Excerpts below are from Sohrabi, Naghmeh. Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bold is mine. The number of known accounts of travels by Iranians in the Qajar period (1794-1925)…
I’m late posting this. After finishing up with Emin‘s part and a day and a half of work on the proposal to A Space Gallery, I took a day, Thursday, 22nd, to clean up my desks, resort the material, and…
Submitted May 21, 2014 PASSAGES Gita Hashemi Proposal to A Space Gallery Passages is a multi-platform work (performance, video, web) that draws from travelogues and memoirs written during 17th, 18th and 19th centuries by travelers from the “East,” focused mostly…
In deciding to focus only on Joseph Emin’s early days in England, I am obviously leaving out large parts of his life as an intellectual and liberation activist. I may return to this, perhaps to incorporate one of his many…
Along with Zainab Amadahy I participated in an interview on CIUT radio with the Vibe Collective on the 10th. Short interview so I didn’t get to explore the relations between art and healing, though embodiment and breath were discussed. On…
Excerpts from Emin, Joseph. Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, An Armenian, Written in English by Himself. Retrieved from Archive.Org 10/02/2014. Corrected through comparison with Emin, Joseph. Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, An Armenian, Written in English by Himself.…
Excerpts from Emin, Joseph. Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, An Armenian, Written in English by Himself. Retrieved from Archive.Org 10/02/2014. Corrected through comparison with Emin, Joseph. Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, An Armenian, Written in English by Himself.…
Joseph Emin (1726-1809) was born in Hamadan, Persia, in an Armenian family that, according to his memoirs, were uprooted from Armenia, a few generations before Joseph’s birth, by one of Shah Abbas’s campaigns. When he was a child of five,…
In addition to getting overshadowed by Robert Sherley’s figure and posturings, Sampsonia/Teresia‘s narrative gets mixed with the story of Naqd Ali Beg, a Persian who showed up in England as ambassador from Shah Abbas. His presence totally messed up Robert’s…
Excerpts from Wright, Denis. The Persians Amongst the English: Episodes in Anglo-Persian History. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1985. Pp 1-9 A note on the source: Perhaps because this book was published in 1985, height of anti-Iran sentiments in the…