Mercer Union is delighted to launch SESSION, a project modelling itself after an incubator that invites cultural practitioners to engage with questions that emerge out of a given exhibition. Taking the form of workshops, conversations or teach-ins, SESSION is interested in developing a dialogue between peers based on shared commitments and engagements. Each SESSION is led by artists, writers, educators and other cultural practitioners who might engage with the ambiguous, contentious or problematic aspect of a project, based on their own thinking and practice.

Our inaugural SESSION looks at Gulf imaginaries foreseen throughout the region and its peripheries in history and in myth. It is an attempt to shift discourse on the Middle East away from notions of dystopia. This incubator will begin with two projects that emerged out of archival material located in Toronto (CA) and London (UK), were serendipitously set in motion around the same time in Tehran, and developed through divergent yet mirrored timelines. In Chooka (2018), a film by Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, and Prizes from Fairyland (2018), by Rouzbeh Akhbari, the artists investigate the involvement of foreigners in the transformation of local landscapes as well as the promises and mysteries embedded in archives. Each film, however, arrives at a different place, undoing presumed narratives. Through looking back at the various encounters, protagonists and informants that figured into their respective projects, the incubator will offer a moment to reconsider the persistent belief in futures that do not align with the past or present.