Talk-See
Ali Moammery
- Period
- 2017–ongoing
- Location
- Bojnourd, Mashhad, Tehran (mobile, urban)
Project Overview
Talk-See is a mobile art space built inside a passenger car. Small paintings made on one-thousand toman banknotes are displayed either framed or as postcards on a handmade stand that replaces the front passenger seat. The audience is whoever happens to call a ride-hailing taxi through Snapp or Tapsi and finds themselves, by chance, inside what is effectively a small gallery on wheels. A conversation between the driver-artist and the passenger develops over the course of the ride, and the works can be purchased if the passenger is interested.
The project has been running since 2017 and continues across Bojnourd, Mashhad, and Tehran. The title plays on the Persian word for taxi (تاکسی), opening it out into "talk" and "see", naming what the situation in the car is set up to do.
Context & Site
The site is a car moving through the streets of Bojnourd, Mashhad, or Tehran, temporarily reconfigured as a small gallery. The interior of a car is neither fully public nor fully private. It is enclosed and intimate, but it sits inside the everyday traffic of the city and is briefly shared with strangers. The project takes this in-between condition as its working space. The choice of the car was tied directly to the question of who the project wanted to reach. The audience for galleries in the cities the project moves through tends to be a recurring one, and Moammery was interested in encountering people who would not typically come to an art space. Rather than asking that audience to come to the work, the work places itself in the path of their daily commute. At moments when Moammery has had a gallery exhibition in his hometown of Bojnourd, the car has also been parked next to the exhibition space, letting the mobile setup sit alongside the conventional one.
Participation & Process
Encounters mainly involve the general public and taxi passengers — people from various walks of life who enter the space by chance. Their participation takes shape through encountering the artworks in an unexpected space, observing them, and, most importantly, conversing with the artist. The interior space of the car, acting as a semi-private environment, facilitates short but focused conversations. This project resembles a "happening" situation where each encounter is a unique event. The audience can transition between different roles, ranging from a spectator to an active participant, and even to an art buyer.
The act that ties the situation together is the live painting. At red lights and during stops, the artist paints on the back of the banknotes using a clipboard mounted on the steering wheel. As Moammery describes it:
During the ride, at red lights and stops, I use the clipboard I've fitted to the steering wheel to paint on the backs of the banknotes. The act of painting itself creates an extra excitement and curiosity for the passengers, and becomes an effective way of opening conversation, building rapport, and creating the trust for them to share their views and thoughts.
With the passenger's consent, the conversation is sometimes audio-recorded; a dashcam mounted to face the sky ahead provides a corresponding image track without showing anyone's face. The recording holds the voice but withholds identity. Participation in this project is momentary and discontinuous; each encounter is an independent experience that cannot be easily repeated for the same individual.
Motivations & Questions
The project grew out of an interest in stepping outside the relatively closed circuit of gallery audiences. Moammery wanted to test whether artworks could be presented, and even sold, to people who do not normally engage with art spaces, not by lowering the work to meet them, but by changing where the encounter takes place. The taxi conversation is a familiar Iranian setting for cross-class exchange, and the project draws on this familiarity, layering questions about art, economy, and everyday life onto a situation people already know how to inhabit.
The questions running through the project can be put this way:
The broader context the project responds to has two sides. On one, an awareness of who galleries reach and who they do not, and a curiosity about what an art practice looks like when it is structurally outside that audience. On the other, the layered pressures, economic, social, and urban that make a low-cost, mobile, semi-private setting one of the more workable formats for sustained encounters in the city. The work uses what is already there: the trust between driver and passenger, the dead time of traffic, and the banknote as a small, portable, charged surface.
Can an everyday situation be turned into a space for artistic experience? What possibilities for exchanging views can a short conversation in motion produce? And how can art enter the normal flow of life without relying on official institutions?
Conditions & Negotiations
The project has been carried out without any institutional support and is entirely self-funded by the artist. No censorship or formal obstruction has been reported across the years of operation. The combination of self-funding and the project's small footprint has kept it relatively flexible and free to continue.
The working strategy is to use what would otherwise be unused: the dead time of traffic and stops, the ready-made interior of a ride-hailing car, and the everyday trust between a driver and a passenger that is already in place when someone orders a ride. The mobile form is itself part of the strategy. The project can relocate, adapt, and pause, rather than holding to a fixed venue or schedule.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
Talk-See is a solo, self-organised project by Ali Moammery, carried out without an institutional host, partner, or curator. The project has no production budget and is funded entirely by the artist; the car, materials, recording equipment, and time have all been covered personally over the years the project has been active.
Re-reading
Re-reading
Further Resources
Ongoing project documentation on Instagram (@talk.see.projects).
About the Artist
Ali Moammery (b. 1981, Bojnourd) is a painter and art instructor with over two decades of practice, working between Mashhad and Bojnourd. He trained in graphics and has shown in solo and group exhibitions at galleries including Sis Art Space and Golshan Gallery in Bojnourd, Naron and Artin galleries in Mashhad, O, Aria, and Haft-Samar galleries in Tehran, and Sepideh Ahadi Gallery in Berlin. Talk-See, his urban participatory project, has been ongoing since 2017.
This entry was prepared based on the artist's account and accompanying project materials.