Exhibition of Azad Collaborative Design Project at Hinterland Gallery, Vienna, Austria

Idea & Design : Reza Abedini

Art Director : Aria Kasaei

Coordination : StudioKargah

Opening: September 7, 2016 talk with Aria Kasaei (in english)

This project was initiated in a non-commercial collaboration between a group of young Iranian graphic designers and Azad Art Gallery in Tehran in 2008. Since then, posters were designed by this group to promote the bi-weekly exhibitions of Azad Art Gallery. For the past 8 years, 44 designers have participated in this project and more than 300 posters designed, printed and distributed.

The continuity of this project has eventually drawn the attention of many other galleries, private and public cultural organizations in Iran to the importance of visual identity and let them to star their cooperation with graphic designers in this field. This project has established an enormous impact on poster design in middle east and has found it’s place in contemporary art and design scene in recent years. The most important aspect of this project is that the poster is not restricted to present only an artwork or image of the artist. It depicts the designer’s visual interpretation of the theme or the concept of the artworks and it means that the poster design becomes a form of artistic expression.

This exhibition first took place in February 2009 in Tehran. In November 2012, the exhibition was held at Bethanien Art Centre in Berlin as part of the “Right-To-Left” event. The exhibition moved to Maxxi Foundation in Rome in November 2014 as part of the “IRAN, Unedited History” event. The next host of this project was the Lebanese American University in Beirut in April 2016.

Hinterland Galerie is the fifth location where this initiative is being exhibited and we are proud to share it with our friends and colleagues in Vienna.

Participating Designers :
Mohammadreza Abdolali - Cassra Abedini - Reza Abedini - Mojtaba Adibi - Hooman Alizadeh - Ali Asali - Alireza Askarifar - Reza Babajani - Shahrzad Changalvaee - Homa Delvaray - Maryam Enayati - Vahid Erfanian - Abou Saeed Eskandari - Golnaz Esmaili - Farhad Fozouni - Amirali Ghasemi - Behrad Javanbakht - Aria Kasaei - Saam Keshmiri - Mohammad Khodashenas - Armin Mahdavi - Ali Meer Azimi - Leila Miri - Masoud Morgan - Omid Nemalhabib - Maziyar Pahlevan - Peyman Pourhosein - Iman Raad - Sanaz Soltani - Rambod Vala The exhibition will be on through October 8, 2016