Eva Wilson & Abbas Zahedi

“ ” #7: Abbas Zahedi & Eva Wilson
Book Launch & Open Reading
Various contributors
19 July 2023

Please join us for the book launch of “ ” #7: Abbas Zahedi in conversation with Eva Wilson with an Open Reading at FormaHQ. Following Forma’s support of Abbas Zahedi’s Open Mic as part of the Frieze Artist Award 2022 at Regent’s Park, we are excited to host the artist’s latest project and continue our collaboration.

Launch & Open Reading
On the evening of the launch, the authors and editors are hosting an Open Reading at Forma: guests are invited to bring their own or found short-form texts to read at the open mic. Everyone is welcome but spaces are limited: sign-up is at the door, and contributions should be no longer than five minutes.

The Open Reading will be followed by Bibliography Beats, a playlist assembled from music, sound, and video provided by the people whose thinking, writing, or presence flowed into the making of the book.

About the Book
Published by NERO and La Becque Editions in June 2023, Abbas Zahedi in conversation with Eva Wilson is the seventh issue of the series “ ” (quotation mark quotation mark), edited by Adam Gibbons and Eva Wilson. The series looks at the forms and roles of publishing as and within artists’ practices: works that operate through circulation, dispersion, language, networks, myth, parasiting, or infiltration. It gives space to constituent parts of practices that often go unacknowledged, such as the conversations that sustain them, and it considers how we arrive at the places we find ourselves.

Abbas Zahedi became an artist by way of a medical education, a philosophy symposium in a chip shop, community organising, and ‘Dissociative Realism’, as described in an essay by Arsalan Isa. With Eva Wilson, Zahedi discusses the thresholds of the ‘art world’ among other worlds and explores translation and transplantation as frameworks that allow us to understand ourselves in relation to others — as life-support systems to counter the erosion of identity through trauma. What happens when we think of the space of art as a living body? How can we hold this space for ourselves and each other?

Documentation from Abbas Zahedi's Open Mic at the Frieze Artist Award 2022.