THE FUTURE STATE #02

Goethe at LUX Artist Residency
Experimental Research Roundtable

THE FUTURE STATE #02, a round table continuing the discussion about what the future of The Islamic Republic of Iran may look like.
This second event in a series of roundtables is part of artist Anahita Razmi’s Goethe at LUX residency project THE FUTURE STATE. Exploring different diasporic perspectives on Iran’s potential future, the project references the work of Iranian Marxist Mansoor Hekmat, who is buried in close proximity to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery close to LUX. Hekmat was a theorist, revolutionary and leader of the Iranian worker communist movement, active in Iran until 1981 and in Kurdistan and the UK afterwards until his death in 2002.
Chaired by Anahita Razmi the roundtable will include the following speakers:
Azar Majedi is an Iranian communist activist, writer, broadcaster, chairperson of the Organization for Women’s Liberation and one of the leading figures of the Worker-Communist movement. She is also the Founder of the Mansoor Hekmat Foundation, committed to publishing Mansoor Hekmat’s works, letters, speeches, and interviews in Persian, English and other languages.
Houzan Mahmoud is a Kurdish women’s rights campaigner, and co-founder of Culture Project (http://cultureproject.org.uk), a platform for Kurdish writers, feminists, artists and activists. She was born in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her articles were published in publications including The Independent and The Guardian, The Tribune, The Newstatsman and others.
Miranda Pennell is an artist and filmmaker. Her recent moving-image work uses archival materials as the starting point for a reflection on the colonial imaginary. Her feature-length filmThe Host (2015) reworks images from the archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later renamed BP) together with a number of personal, family photographs.