Knockout Tournament: Conversations over a Ping-pong Table
New Media Society
- Period
- 2019
- Location
- New Media Projects, Tehran
Project Overview
Knockout Tournament: Conversations over a Ping-pong Table was a week-long event organised by New Media Society in Tehran in January 2019, timed deliberately to run alongside the city's commercial art week, Teer Art. The interior of the New Media Projects space was temporarily reconfigured as a sports venue, with a ping-pong table at its centre and the usual project-space arrangement set aside.
The tournament gathered thirty-two participants from a wide range of fields, including painters, architects, curators, actors, and a massage therapist, among others. The table became a setting where conversation about the working conditions of artists could unfold during matches and in between rounds. Conceived as a counter-event to the art-fair economy taking place a short distance away, it proposed competition and play as a frame for collective reflection.
Context & Site
New Media Society was an independent, non-commercial, research-oriented initiative active in Tehran from July 2014. Its premises in central Tehran had functioned as an archive, library, and project space for several years before the tournament, hosting lectures, workshops, residencies, and exhibitions, and sustaining a connection between local and international practitioners outside the commercial gallery system.
Holding the event in this space, and timing it precisely with Teer Art week, was itself part of the proposition. Rather than competing for visibility within the art fair's commercial circuit, the project chose the project space as a deliberate alternative geography: a setting where the conversation could be about the conditions of practice rather than the display of works for sale.
The decision to reconfigure the space as a sports venue mattered. By dismantling the usual exhibition layout and installing a ping-pong table at the centre, the space stopped functioning as a place where audiences contemplate finished works, and became a place where everyone present was either a player or in conversation around the game.
Participation & Process
The tournament ran over eight days, from 4pm to 8pm each afternoon, and was open to the public. Entry required a fee of 20,000 Tomans, which went entirely toward the symbolic championship trophy.
The initial conceit was a symbolic confrontation between gallery-affiliated artists and independent artists. Once participation was opened to the public, this binary loosened. Thirty-two people from across the city, including a painter, an architect, a curator, an actor, and a massage therapist, among others, signed up to play.
Each participant introduced themselves at the table. Conversation continued during matches and between rounds, drifting across topics: lived experience, professional status, current working arrangements. Discussions ranged from the roots of abstract painting in Iranian art education and the influence of figures such as Nosratollah Kasraian and Yaghoub Amamehpich, to performance and body studies, including how theatre training disciplines the body to make playing with an imaginary ball appear real. At certain moments, participants substituted a paintbrush for a racket, a gesture that functioned as a metaphor for the artist's position within the field. The tournament concluded with Omid Fattahi, a massage therapist, taking the championship, followed by the multimedia artist Behzad Hatefi in second place and the abstract painter Morteza Darehbaghi in third.
Motivations & Questions
The project came out of a concern with the everyday working conditions of artists in Tehran, and a sense that the structures of the art week, and the gallery economy it represented, left little room for those conditions to be talked about openly. The intent was to create a different kind of gathering: informal, non-hierarchical, where conversation could surface around the act of play.
Across the week, "livelihood and independence" emerged as the central concern. Participants articulated how the independent artist in Tehran is required to occupy several roles at once: creator, manager, accountant, marketer, and even transporter of their own work. The cumulative weight of this multiplicity, and the isolation it produces, made the case for a space of mutual exchange and a form of trade-based solidarity.
Three structural critiques ran through the discussions. First, the geographical centralism of events such as Teer Art, which concentrate visibility on Tehran while sidelining artists and curators from other provinces. Second, the structural ambiguities of Iran's gallery system, particularly around contracts that do not distinguish between displaying a work and representing the artist, and the limited capacity of artists' unions to address these problems. Third, the role of the educational system, from art conservatories to universities, in shaping not only training but the aesthetic orientations of its graduates.
Conditions & Negotiations
The main obstacles were both conceptual and practical. Conceptually, the project worked through the mental and structural challenges of defining the artist's identity, particularly the tension between independent artists and those affiliated with galleries. Practically, the space had to be adapted to host a sports-art event it was not designed for.
The primary strategy involved a "change of use" and a "shifting of concepts": turning a sports competition into a critical and educational platform, and opening participation to the public in order to dismantle the hypothetical, elite-centric boundaries between artists and other societal classes.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
Knockout Tournament was conceived, organised, and hosted by New Media Society as part of its independent project programme, with Amirali Ghasemi as host and facilitator. The tournament was open to the public, and the thirty-two participants joined the programme. A report on the matches was written by Bahar Ahmadifard and published on the New Media Society website.
The project was organised entirely independently, without external sponsorship. Its only financial source was the participants' entry fee of 20,000 Tomans, which was used to purchase the symbolic championship trophy.
Re-reading
Further Resources
Bahar Ahmadifard, "Report on the Knockout Cup Tournament," New Media Society website (in Persian).
The recording of the event is held in the New Media Society archive.
About the Artist
New Media Society is an independent, non-commercial, research-oriented collective in Tehran, active since June 2014 (Tir 1393). It has functioned as an archive, library, and project space, supporting media arts and emerging practices through lectures, workshops, publishing, and cultural residency programs. The collective has sought to fill a gap in academic infrastructure and to build connections between artists working in Iran and abroad, and New Media Projects, its physical space, hosted many other initiatives and partner collectives over the years. The Tehran space has been closed since January 2023, and the collective now continues as a nomadic and online entity. Mapping Karimkhan was one of its participatory urban projects.
Website: newmediasoc.com Instagram: @newmediasociety
This entry was prepared based on materials and texts shared by the collective, and edited in collaboration with the initiator.