Tanakura Parking
Parkingallery Projects
- Period
- 2011
- Location
- Parkingallery, Tehran
Project Overview
Tanakura Parking was a participatory event in the space of Parkingallery Projects that took shape around second-hand clothing and the stories that came with it. With a call for used but still usable clothing and short stories, participants were asked to bring their clothes to the gallery for display, exchange, and sale; the condition for a piece to be sold or exchanged was that a story had been attached to it. Some turned their wardrobes upside down, and some brought clothes from their personal archive along with the lived experience attached to them.
The space was divided among clothing racks, a table for writing, a fitting room, and a backdrop for photography; something between an exhibition, a second-hand market, and a gathering for dialogue. Prices were negotiable, haggling was allowed, and exchange (bartering) was encouraged, and the clothes that remained at the end were donated to those in need.
Context & Site
The project's name points to a social context that existed independently of it. "Tanakura" was the married surname of Oshin, the main character of the series "Years Away from Home" (the Persian broadcast title of the Japanese series Oshin); a series broadcast during the years of the Iran-Iraq war that became so famous that second-hand clothing shops in Iran, influenced by the Tanakura chain store in that same series, took on this name. These shops, selling used foreign clothing imported in bulk, targeted wider layers of postwar society. Alongside this, the title Tanakura Parking is also bound up with the concept of the garage sale; a custom that in Iran, on account of apartment living, became more of a "home sale," and that has for years been bound up in the memory of many Iranians with the direct selling of belongings on the occasion of emigration.
The event was held in the Parkingallery space; a space with room for about four cars that, after a modest renovation, was put back into use from 2011 with a new function, and was made available to the project on account of its accessibility and proximity to the office of Parkingallery Projects. The dual use of this space was itself a condition of the event: during the show and after it ended, the objects had to be moved so that cars could be parked in the parking space again.
Participation & Process
The project began with a call on Facebook and phone and word-of-mouth follow-ups to invite artists, writers, and interested people. Participation took several forms. One set of participants brought their own clothes, sorted them, wrote a story for them on paper, put the paper in an envelope, and attached the envelope to the garment with a label; mounting the clothes on the racks was also done collectively.
To one side, storyless clothes sat on a separate rack, and on a table, envelopes and blank sheets of paper were ready. After choosing a piece that had caught their eye or inspired their writing, a visitor could add a story they had written to it, carry the garment to the other side of the space, and hang it on a coat rack. A camera, lights, and a photography tripod occupied part of the space, and a fitting room and a curtain for a backdrop had been arranged; those who had come only to watch and talk could also wear the clothes and be photographed with their choice. The rest of the space resembled something like a Friday market or a second-hand shop. In this way, bodies engaged with the work in two forms: bodies that carried out the imagination of writing, and bodies that tried on wearing, seeing, and being seen.
A rule governed the work: only clothes that had a story attached to them could be sold or exchanged; storyless, unlabeled clothes remained outside this cycle. On one of the days, Martin Shamoonpour presented a storytelling performance, of which only a single photograph remains.
Motivations & Questions
The project's motivation took shape around the reuse of unused clothing and the idea of making a space for participation in the vicinity of objects, stories, and unforeseen interactions; interactions that, in the words of Parkingallery Projects, arise from the very placing of these elements alongside one another. One of the aims was experimentation in writing and in object-based works; works activated by narrative that make social exchange among artists, writers, and audiences easier. In that period, Parkingallery's focus was on interdisciplinary activities that had no place for presentation in the official and semi-official spaces of Iranian art, and that, in their own phrasing, worked at "loosening the bricks" that the crooked but relatively sturdy structure of the prevailing educational system had imposed on them.
In their account, the work's urgency was to bridge between artists of different disciplines and audiences and to widen the circle of those who can interact through art; and also an effort to draw art out of being something decorative or class-bound, in which being "exalted" or its relation to the institution of art is the only measure of its value. They pursued this work in a participatory form because, in their own words, the project's formation was impossible except through the participation of the audience (whether artist or not); the aim was to open a space for participation, the conceptual openness of the work, and the breaking of the boundaries defined for art. Adding narrative and imagination to the object took it beyond its objecthood and opened the possibility of working with a range of assemblages, readymades, and archives; an approach that, in the words of Parkingallery Projects, was still novel at the time of the performance relative to what was current in the art-exhibition space.
The question that remained for them went back to documentation. Every work and its story had been photographed, but these images and texts never found the chance to come together and have, in the words of Parkingallery Projects, probably remained scattered in a corner of a hard drive and in a box in storage; something that makes reconstructing and documenting the project difficult. They say that in the next edition they applied greater order to recording and, especially, to accounting. After the official end, other artistic circles unrelated to Parkingallery Projects formed around the reuse of clothing, some with an economic approach; and Tanakura itself was performed again a few years later, in a different form, in the space of the New Media Society in central Tehran.
Conditions & Negotiations
The project was carried out without an institutional structure and in an unregistered, informal space; a situation that, in the words of Parkingallery Projects, worked in the work's favor. The role of the work's initiators shifted, during the performance, among several defined tasks: from managing the floor and facilitation and administrative work to refreshments, guidance, and cleaning. The rule of attaching a story to a garment was also observed toward the end of the work with less care than in the early days.
The work's tension was more with the audience's expectations than with the institution of power; in their words, the performance's duration was too short to lead to any serious challenge. Some came merely to buy a piece, or expressed dissatisfaction with the wear and the history the clothes had passed through; the team's sharing of the project's ideas reduced these misunderstandings to some extent. In the account of Parkingallery Projects, Tanakura Parking, alongside redefining the pattern of consumption and giving new life to second-hand goods, was also a social experience and sought to extend the bounds of a participatory activity in the relatively conservative scene of Tehran's art. This approach remained on the margins for years and later, with the spread of the concept of the outlet and the transformation of lifestyle and, in particular, the change in the pattern of second-hand clothing consumption, became, in their words, such a "trend" that it was sometimes sold for more than new clothing, under the headings of retro and classic.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
Tanakura Parking brought together a group of visual and performance artists, writers, and art enthusiasts; among them, one may mention Hamed Rashtian, Mojtaba Amini, Jala Anvari, Delbar Shahbaz, and Nastaran Safaei. The project's curation was handled by Amirali Ghasemi, who also did the event's photography. No institution played a part in the work's formation, and the project proceeded without a budget or cash backer, at personal expense; the main support was the provision of the Parkingallery space. The clothes that remained at the end were donated to those in need through one or two NGOs.
About the Artist
Parkingallery Projects was an independent base and experimental space in Tehran, founded in 1998 by a few art students, and in the beginning a graphic-design studio and a temporary workshop and exhibition space. In the summer of 2002, with the launch of the site parkingallery.com, it expanded the possibility of showing works online and set about introducing a new generation of contemporary artists. Among its projects one may mention the multimedia exhibitions Deep Depression and Deeper Depression in Tehran and Isfahan, Lost in Nowhere and Iran, etc. in Istanbul, the Images Reloaded workshop in Tehran and Berlin, Side Roads in Iran and the Netherlands, Urban Jealousies: The Roaming Biennial of Tehran in Istanbul, Berlin, and Belgrade, and the founding of the Limited Access Festival (exhibitions of video, sound, and performance in Tehran, Cairo, and London). The physical space of Parkingallery Projects ended its work in the winter of 2012–2013 with an exhibition, but continues its activity as an open collective and a video-art archive.
Contact: newmediatehran@gmail.com · Instagram: @newmediasociety · Website: parkingallery.com
This entry was written on the basis of the project documentation and a conversation with the artist, and was edited in collaboration with the artist.