The center is not in the middle but on the top because it is the only way it can recombine what it isolates through subordination.
— Gilles Deleuze

1. I organized an exhibition together with a group of Geneva-based artists in June 2000, which is where we met and became friends. Thinking back it is odd how important the relation was to me for the intellectual link we shared.
2. The work inquires into issues of urban space, and is informed by material from outside Iran as well as within, incorporating all sorts of intellectual
currents in the most subtle and uncomplicated manner. To call such work peripheral would imply that it was somehow more ‘extrinsic’ to
international trends and movements than, say, my own here in Europe. While to call it a “new center” ignores the hierarchies at hand. So in this context, perhaps such work can do little more than raise the question of what the politicized pathos and commotion behind Euroamerican
center-periphery debates could possibly imply.
3. When it comes to artists, some never abandoned the self-imposed
peripheries of elitist temperament, and others choose peripheral strategies for practicing political critique. But even here, neither can ignore the
pressure to enter some center or other, not just for their careers, but also because the relevance of reaching large audiences is simply a primary
intellectual parameter of our time.
— Tirdad Zolghadr