Passage”
In October 2024, in response to an invitation from Maryam Majd Art Projects (MMAP), eight members of the «Foj» collective held intensive brainstorming sessions to develop works for their upcoming exhibition.
The group started their collaborative efforts two years ago, and their first creative production was unveiled in March 2023, featuring eleven distinct projects at O Gallery in Tehran.
During these brainstorming sessions, following collective research on the city of Bandar Anzali, [Anzali Port] the group found common ground between the port city’s characteristics and their own concerns. Themes such as crossroads and intersections of different thoughts and beliefs, questions of identity, personal and collective memories, and the impact of distance on understanding and communication between individuals emerged as central. With this core concept in place, the group chose to expand on a previous project showcased in O Gallery, titled “I Walk Howsoever”—an animation project proposed by Mehdi Shiri—by further exploring the video as a medium.
In this project, «Foj» has produced the video “We Were the Ones Who Looked Into Each Other’s Eyes the Most”, focusing on three central themes: the challenges of arriving at a unified idea through collaboration between members, capturing both everyday and striking images of Bandar Anzali, and animating these scenes using the rotoscoping technique. The video features:
– Rotoscoping animation of images from Bandar Anzali
– Original footage of Bandar Anzali and photos taken during trips
– Recorded images and sounds from the brainstorming sessions during the creative process.
The other works created in this exhibition, emerged from the creative process of the project and displayed in a layout specifically designed for Choom Gallery’s space, are as follows:
• Selected frames from the collective animation created by all members
• «Passage, No. 01», an animation by Serminaz Barseghian, representing diagrams of interactions between people, edited against a backdrop of videos being watched in brainstorming sessions
• «Surface Tension», photographs by Raoof Dashti, capturing the meeting point of the sea and bay, accompanied by subtitles of dialogues between group members
• «The Lagoon in Five Layers», a continuation of a project from the group›s previous exhibition, proposed by Aylar Dastgiri, featuring abstract layers that come together to form a single image
• Short animated videos performed by Farzad Majidi, Raoof Dashti, Neda Mirhosseini, and Mehdi Shiri

Participating Artists:
Serminaz Barseghian
Sepehr Hajiabadi
Aylar Dastgiri
Raoof Dashti
Mehdi Shiri
Farzad Majidi
Shahrooz Mohammad
Neda Mirhosseini