Cafe Konj Performances
Jinoos Taghizadeh
- Period
- 2003–2004
- Location
- Tehran — Cafe Konj
Project Overview
Cafe Konj Performances was a series of seven long-duration performances staged in a small cafe in central Tehran. Each performance ran twelve continuous hours, on the seventh day of each month, for seven consecutive months. The performances were each different in form and content, and the audience's role shifted across the seven months: at times they were active participants drawing alongside the artist or writing letters, at other times observers or even unwitting subjects of what was happening around them.
Context & Site
Cafe Konj was a small cafe in central Tehran, near Keshavarz Boulevard and Valiasr Square. In 2003 the city centre had almost no galleries or cultural cafes; those were concentrated in northern Tehran. The centre of the city was a place of transit and work, of administrative buildings and people moving through, and therefore, Cafe Konj's audience was made up of passersby and people in the area, alongside the cafe's growing circle of regulars.
For Taghizadeh, the choice of this site was deliberate. To stage the performances here, rather than in a gallery or in any space already framed as artistic, meant working with an audience that had not arrived expecting an artwork and would not necessarily recognise one. The cafe held the work without absorbing it into the conventions of an art space: there was no threshold to cross, no programme to read, no critical context in place. Each performance had to negotiate its own legibility within the rhythms of an ordinary day.
The site also placed the project at a distance from the institutional centre of gravity that, in those years, was beginning to consolidate around "conceptual art" with official support. Working from a small cafe outside the art neighbourhoods was, in this sense, also a positioning: a way of locating the practice in the city and its everyday traffic rather than in the formal art scene.
Participation & Process
The seven performances did not share a single model of participation. In one, audiences bought Hafez fortunes from the artist as they would from a street vendor. In another, they sat in a cafe webbed with skeins of yarn while she read a handmade book aloud without pause. In a third, they were drawn into an unfolding act of bandaging. Elsewhere across the series, visitors wrote letters to be carried to the afterlife, drew alongside the artist, asked for a child to be healed, or signed their names to acknowledge that the coffee they were about to drink was poisoned. The artist's role shifted accordingly: vendor, reader, nurse, traveller, mourner, healer, host. The cafe itself remained constant.
The twelve-hour duration of each day shaped what participation could be. Visitors arrived, left, returned, and brought others. Some lingered into the evening, watching the conditions in the cafe shift around them. Some entered the work directly, drawing, writing, signing, accepting bandages, taking the offered coffee. Others were listeners, witnesses, or interlocutors whose attention was reshaped without their consent being explicitly requested.
Across the seven months, audiences entered the work with a level of trust the artist has returned to repeatedly. Even when the situations were disorienting, physically uncomfortable, or ethically charged, the responses were rarely oppositional. In some performances Taghizadeh was, in part, trying to provoke pushback. She had agreed in advance with the cafe owners on what to do if a complaint were made or the cafe were closed down. But the pushback never came.
Motivations & Questions
Cafe Konj Performances grew out of a search for a form of artistic encounter that did not depend on the gallery, the institutional audience, or the critical apparatus around contemporary art. The project took shape during a period when "conceptual art" was being consolidated in Iran with the active support of official institutions, and new structures of direction and control over contemporary practice were forming. The cultural openness of the Reform years was, in Taghizadeh's reading, accompanied by a careful image-making: a chic, international-facing face being constructed by a state whose more recent record of repression had not yet been addressed. The museum and its curators were part of constructing that image. Cafe Konj Performances was an attempt to step outside that frame and to look for direct conversation with an audience who was not part of the art world.
It was also, for the artist, a process of working out what the role of an artist could mean in a context where the medium of performance was still largely undefined. Without easy access to images or texts about performance art elsewhere (dial-up internet, an unfamiliar vocabulary, almost no Persian-language references), she developed each of the seven performances by thinking aloud in front of an audience whose presence and reactions were themselves part of how she came to understand the medium of performance. The questions she has named as central to the experience are her own:
Underneath these, a further question shaped the project's whole approach to its audience:
The series also drew on a small lineage of independent practice from the 1990s. The khaneh kalangi (خانهکلنگی) projects, staged in soon-to-be-demolished houses by Hooman Mortezavi, Shahrokh Ghiasi, and later Bita Fayyazi, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Sasan Nasiri, and others, had been Taghizadeh's own first encounter as a student with video and installation. Cafe Konj shares its gesture with the work of Neda Razavipour and the Parallel Group (گروه موازی) at the time, and with Bita Fayyazi's earlier practice: the gesture of stepping away from the museum and the gallery and toward the city.
What did I want from the work? What did the audience want from art? Could non-traditional media reach people who were not part of the art world?
In most of the works I made, I didn't want people to think they were watching a work of art. I wanted them to experience a moment, a creative event, something that planted something in their mind or raised a question, whether or not they knew it was art. Saying 'this is a work of art' itself draws a boundary between the work and the person standing in front of it.
Conditions & Negotiations
The performances were carried out without official permits and outside any institutional frame. After the third performance, a member of the intelligence services visited the cafe and spoke with the owner: he had a file on the artist, knew details of her personal life, and made it understood that she was being watched. Taghizadeh's first response was to try to obtain a permit, partly to protect the cafe owners from any further trouble. There was, however, no administrative category for the medium. The Ministry of Culture had no relevant department; the police licensing office could not engage with the proposal at all; the municipal cultural office said the activity did not fall within its remit. Performance art was, for the larger part of the official art apparatus at the time, an unanswered question.
The responses were practical and deliberate. The work continued without applying for permits, leaving any decision to stop it to whichever supervisory body chose to assert itself. The absence of a sponsor was treated as a condition of independence rather than a deficit. Every decision about form, timing, and content could be made without consultation, and without the obligation to justify the work to a funder or to a brand. An agreement with the cafe owners covered what to do if a complaint were filed or the cafe were sealed. The social conditions of the early 2000s also helped: before the more pervasive surveillance and the saturation of smartphone-mediated documentation that came later, it was possible to sustain the series across seven months and to think through ideas with relative freedom.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
The series was made possible by the trust of the cafe's owners, Sattar Afshar and Maryam Monjezi, who hosted the seven performances without conditions on form or content.
The project was self-funded; there was no production budget.
Re-reading
Further Resources
"Report and interview on the Café Konj performances," Yek Haftom magazine (ed. Farhad Jafari), 2003 (in Persian; print archive only).
Farhad Jafari, Café Piano (novel), Cheshmeh Publishing, 2007 (in Persian).
Café Piano (کافه پیانو), a novel by Farhad Jafari (Cheshmeh Publishing, 2007), built its central female character around the Cafe Konj performances. The performances themselves are reproduced in detail. Only that character's name is changed; all other figures in the novel appear under their real names. Taghizadeh filed a copyright complaint against the author and publisher. The novel was widely read until Jafari's public support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election led to a reader boycott, after which it was not reprinted.
About the Artist
Jinoos Taghizadeh (b. 1971, Tehran) studied Dramatic Literature at the Niavaran Cultural Center and Sculpture at the University of Tehran. Her early work spanned set design, screenwriting, puppet theatre, and children's illustration. She has since collaborated with publications inside and outside Iran as a critic, essayist, and art editor. She was one of the editors of Tehran Avenue, an early bilingual platform on art and the city, which organised the first three editions of Iran's underground music festival in the early 2000s. Her practice as a civic actor has continued in parallel with her artistic work. Her work has been shown at biennials, museums, and art centres internationally over the past three decades. She has been based in Toronto since 2022, where she is also pursuing studies in creative writing.
Email: jinoos.tag@gmail.com
Instagram: @jinoostaghizadeh52hertzstudio Website: www.jinoostaghizadeh.ca
This entry was prepared based on the artist's account and accompanying project materials.