Ctrl+Alt+Del : Shadi Ghadirian

During my many visits to Iran in the last ten years, I have often discussed with artists the desperate need for more publications to make their work better known to the wider public. There is a conspicuous absence of information about artists living in Iran. When I applied in Europe for funding to publish monographs or thematic works on artists from a country with endless emerging talents, but very isolated politically, I encountered several difficulties: funding bodies preferred to give money to the countries directly. So I asked Ghadirian, whose gentle nature, kindness, and generous disposition had attracted many photographers to gather around her, to build a team so they could apply for funding. This was the beginning of the Tehran-based Fanoos project. Fanoos, which means 'lantern' or 'guiding light' in Farsi, is an association of Iranian photographers that aims to promote the work of more than 120 top photographer-members. Its founders, Jalal Sepehr, Dariush Kiani, and Shadi Ghadirian, have succeeded in creating an appropriate environment for promoting photographic art and providing resources to potential exhibitors.

While working hard on the Fanoos website, Ghadirian became pregnant. For a professional photographer, digitisation and the internet are a double-edged sword, and the computer work exhausted her. She assembled her sister and friends, and asked them to perform 'the dance of exhaustion', to perform the fatigue of a computer bound worker. To Ghadirian, the contained world of the computer is just as inspiring as the world outside, a representation of reality, if not reality itself. It also questions the values of globalisation, of obsessive working and the conflicts brought about by changing lifestyles. By the time she finshed the Fanoos photo project, Western funding bodies had changed their policy, and suddenly grants could be given to foreign bodies to promote artists inside Iran.