Contributor

Amin Nadi

Amin Nadi is an Iranian integrated media artist, writer, and researcher based in London, Ontario, and Yazd, Iran. He holds an MFA in Film and Media Arts from the University of Windsor. He currently teaches at Algoma University in Canada and Yazd University in Iran, where he combines practical experience with academic research.

Nadi’s multidisciplinary artistic work explores memory, reminiscence, time, and environmental transformation through new media, audio/video installations, and documentary methods. He focuses on the tension between urban development and cultural loss, often using abandoned spaces as powerful sites of memory and identity. Employing light, found objects, reflective materials, and archival sources, Nadi creates poetic visual narratives that evoke introspection and challenge dominant cultural and capitalist narratives.

Drawing on critical theory, continental philosophy, and postcolonial thought, Nadi’s research centers on “Non-art” practices — social, improvisational, and heterogeneous art forms that resist authoritarian control and cultural commodification, especially in marginalized and postcolonial contexts. His work interrogates the aesthetics of resistance and trans-geographical identity, while questioning dominant cultural narratives and reclaiming forgotten or suppressed histories. Through both his visual and written works, Nadi offers radical critiques of contemporary social and political issues from a transdisciplinary perspective.

Articles

Art Against Object Economy!

Transitive social action, which has a social impact and engages the issues of the present, is part of what makes art contemporary, yet it has become rare in today’s artworks. Much artistic production across many fields is still driven by intuition, experimentation, and aesthetics (rooted more in immediate understanding than in mediated interpretation) and remains enframed within conventional institutional art, where it poses no question to power structures and prompts no change in public attitudes. Categorizing, enframing, and artistic determination are themselves methods of analysis and control. Such works are produced through the repetition and reproduction of forms, technical prowess, or heavy economic investment; they descend from the legacy of modernism without exerting any real influence on authority or the public. The market and the cycle of consumption absorb them, and capitalism profits from them because they never escape its discourse. Practitioners who persist with this approach have stripped art of its relevance to the present and have taught audiences to take art and the artistic process for ornamental, decorative, tradable things, that is, for tangible objects aligned with capitalist methodology, while they hold on to the outdated notion of “high culture” and its ties to modernist ideas.

Exotopy, Neo-Orientalism and Postcolonial Curation

After visiting the Ordinary Moments exhibition, curated by Mansour Forouzesh and featuring a collective of Iranian independent photographers at the FUGA Gallery in Budapest, I was once again convinced that the consumption of modern Iranian visual culture in the West is essentially orientalistic. Precisely through the contrast this exhibition provides, one can see more clearly… Read More »