Bani Khoshnoudi بنفشه

For those asking and not able to get through the paywall, here is the review of THE VANISHING POINT in Screen Daily after its World Premiere and Jury Prize at @visionsdureel … 🎥💫🥀

After 4 years of research, travels, deambulations, hearing testimonies, digging deep in the Mexican national archive, 2 exhibitions with beautiful curatorship by @mblancsube for @museoexperimentaleleco and by @voltajeprieto for @iicmuseouabc , we are overjoyed, excited and moved to finally receive the first copies of the beautiful book on « El Chinero, un cerro fantasma » put together so elegantly by @editorial__enhe with Zosim Silva and Carlos Prieto’s design and care, printed in México DF, thanks to an indispensable grant by Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporaneo. The bilingual book is comprised of 173 pages of my photographs, stills from the film, ink and charcoal drawings and a selection of archives around the presence of Chinese in Mexico, their migration, their labor but also the racist campaigns and purges against them during the first decades of the 20th century. Archives that were clearly untouched for many years as there is too little interest or curiosity of these dark spots of the national narrative. I am deeply honored and grateful for all the incredible contributions to the book, including an extensive 20-page essay by the one and only Nicole Brenez, a conversation between me and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, a beautiful text by Carlos Prieto Acevedo on the different pieces I made for the project, and a reflection on the importance of looking to this past by Mexicali scholar David Bautista Toledo. ** « El Chinero, un cerro fantasma » reminds us that with tombs, cemeteries, individual or collective graves, nothing can be taken for granted and our conception of history or civilizations owes a lot to the symbolic signs that are more or less correctly interpreted and invented. But what should we think then, when the symbolic is completely lacking? This is Bani Khoshnoudi’s work, to create a tomb in the form of a film. Her cenotaph owes as much to cinema as to sculpture, to the optical as to the haptic… » - excerpt from “The mourning image” by Nicole Brenez @nicolebrenez @aayshaaz @devol_david

Images from my exhibit, “El Chinero, a phantom hill”, on view until June 26 at @museoexperimentaleleco in Mexico City. Here is an excerpt from curator Michel Blancsubé‘s text: “…How does one evoke and return to events that took place over a century ago, maintained within memory by simple oral history? How can one transcribe silent witnesses; rocks within a deserted landscape? How can we see the invisible within the visible; distinguish something that has occurred but has since disappeared at this same site? These questions inspired and nourished many aesthetic reflections at the beginning of the 19th century. Photographing the sporadic, discarded materials where a human presence existed at some point at this site in the desert, contributes to this attempt to capture the knowledge of the place. Although never specifically stated, there is a concrete temptation to find hypothetically protagonistic objects that attest to what happened and that have casually traversed time periods. A cactus draws out its long, dry branches on an arid plane. A 16mm film camera slowly interrogates and gently caresses the broken line of a limit; this limit between land and sky, where one ends and the other begins. Although with increasing difficulty, nature continues to absorb our history, digesting it, erasing it, but also keeping it sometimes hidden within its folds and depths…” @mblancsube @paolasantoscoy Photos by: Pavka Segura

Moffat Takadiwa, The Crown! At @semiosegalerie

Slowly coming up for air, to make this very belated post to thank @sophiecavoulacos and @jrcumming for their gracious invitation to share The Vanishing Point with their audiences at DocFortnight this year at @themuseumofmodernart , for now the ONLY screening in the US of A… which is somehow not surprising. Sophie’s generosity and care during those days, I will not forget 🌷❤️‍🩹 So much emotion, intensity, anger and grief all together those days, in the first week of war on Iran, as I walked those streets and the neighborhoods I used to live in. I am so grateful for friends and family who came to see the film and spend time with me (Jem, Elisabeth, Zeynab, Golnar, Layla, Emma, Irene, Sergio, others I am forgetting)…who showed compassion and concern for what was (and continues) happening in Iran and in the whole region. I realize how important the trip was, no matter how trying at times, how necessary it was to get out and speak, exchange, share… think of beauty within so much pain. My film speaks of the silence that has suffocated Iranian society for decades, of the disappeared who have all but been forgotten underneath so many layers of tragedy and the daily atrocities and executions that continue to accumulate and amass,… the war on Iran and the fuel the Islamic Republic feeds it in order to continue ruling through a strategy of death, authoritarianism and basically theatrics of militarized cadavres dictating to a people full of life how they must obey or else be punished… Memories of my city, Tehran, whose images I show as a testament of love and loss… The grief and heartache continue… ❤️‍🩹 *Images of Arthur Jafa’s beautiful curation from the MoMA collection that he calls — Less is Morbid— which he describes as “a counter death wish”… "The answer to disorder in the universe is not genocide. The answer is in how we coexist.” *Golnar Adili’s exhibit at Smack Mellon, called “To Measure the Emotions of Others”, that I was able to visit alone with her, as almost a ritual of mourning far from our peoples…

Feeding a table, Three Women and Crows at a Table, Zoroaster meeting his own image, Elements… and other worlds of Leonora Carrington. How Mexico adopts the best of them. 🫜✨

The brilliant Peter Linebaugh on May Day and the Commons… I recommend watching his whole talk given a few days ago at The Cooper Union. Looking historically to the base and heart of the problems at hand… Available here: /watch?v=Qf7YpIkO740 (And a great antidote to Iranian/axis of whatnot algorithms and simplistic narratives trying to wash regime crimes through revisionist nationalism… just unbearable) #commons #palestine #antifascism #antiwar

Still Life by Mitra Prieto Khoshnoudi (2025), Untitled Mescaline drawing by Henri Michaux (c. 1955), both drawn in Montreuil, 70 years apart… 🌱

Vive l’Internationalisme anti-fasciste! Vive Paris, ville où on peut se sentir dans la post-nation, diverse et mélangée (vraiment) en culture et genre. Ce 1er mai m’a donné beaucoup d’espoir grace à une jeunesse post-genre, post-nation, antiguerre et antifasciste sans peur et solidaire… fêter cela est important car il y a tellement, tellement à faire tous les jours, on s’écroule sous l’angoisse et la fatigue et le desepoir et quelques heures pour voir la joie dans un monde différent possible redonne de la force. N’oublions pas les travailleur/euses précaires et les invisibles de cette terre. Les gens qui sont le plus touchés en temps de guerre… on ne les oublie pas. On prend la force pour suivre la lutte, et la transmettre . ❤️‍🩹🌹

NO TO WAR! STOP THE U.S. FROM SO MUCH MILITARIZATION AND DOMINATION! STOP ISR@€L AND ITS MULTIPLE GENOCIDAL COLONIAL CAMPAIGNS ALREADY! DEBUNK ISLAMIC REPUBLIC (ANTIWOMAN, ANTIWORKER, ANTIKURDISH) PROPAGANDA! AND MOST OF ALL !!! STOP MASS EXECUTIONS IN IRAN !!! Happy May Day 🌹

While being trolled by mysoginist (some women in there as well), Islamic Republic legitimizers/apologists/propagandists/whatever-you-are, I was happily making international alliances of sisterhood at @frauenfilmfest with @anniesprinkled @ebethstephens , Athina- my old friend, Yayoi Kusama her corpses, nightmares, exploding heart, traces of war and screaming girls, and other beautiful and intense meetings and moments that I happily share and transmit to my daughter. Woman Life Freedom and f*ck all the rest! Enough war and enough BS energy, time and money in this game of trying to wash blood off of murderous hands (on all sides)… you can’t wash fast enough when they are killing every single day!

A Dedicated Life 💫📽️❤️‍🔥 With Kazuo Hara in Hamburg When you meet a huge influence and unique creator by chance, after he has seen your film at @dokumentarfilmwochehamburg 🔥🌷