| 17 August 2020 |

Mahmoud Dehnavi. Circa 1978 [Personal Archives]

| 19 August 2020 |

Anchorage point of the Escorpião. August 1621 [Lisbon Maritime Archive]

| 21 August 2020 |

Back cover of ephemeride produced by the British Bushire Resident: Sayyad Thabit. 1625 [Kew Archives, London]

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Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist working in video, installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of critical architecture, human geography and storytelling. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that regiments the world around us. He holds a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University, and a graduate degree in Visual Studies from University of Toronto’s school of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Obsessed with passage of time during quarantine, Akhbari began a new fictocritical novel inspired by his late grandfather, Mahmoud Dehnavi’s unpublished drawings. The plot of his upcoming book revolves around circadian rhythms and various approaches to temporality in political Islam in connection to early 17th century anti-colonial warfare in the Persian Gulf. The following posts compile some of the soundscapes and materials informing the story.

Audio mixing by Shaahin Peymani.

Intervals is a digital image commission that engages the in-between—intervening times, spaces, pauses, and breaks in activity—as taken up by artistic practice. Presented on the Mercer Union website and Instagram, this program invites artists to consider their experience of temporality through its disruption, and the sense of before, during, and after that is punctuated in the process of reflection.

Intervals is made possible with Support from Partners in Art.

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