About – Firoza

The name Firoza refers to the natural light blue to deep green hue of the flora and fauna, water and sky and the possibilities and artistic traditions that surround them. It represents a fresh approach to contemporary Islamic Art that brings together new painting, photography, installation, multimedia, film and video art and performance works in curated projects around the world and online.

Purpose

To show contemporary artists from around the world who use traditions from Islamic Art / Architecture / Culture while also being on the vanguard of ideas, disciplines and materials.

To reflect an Islamic spirit and draw upon the formal traditions found in this genre in a new context.

To promote interdisciplinary work and artists from multiple mediums including painting, photography, installation, multi-media, film and video art and performance.

To make this a legitimate strand of the Contemporary Art World through exhibitions, programmes and critical writing.

Key People

Hedy Hurban

Head of Performing Arts

Hedy Hurban is a designer of costumes and composer of electronic/electroacoustic music. She showcased her collections at DSYN O4 (Delhi, India) and has designed the costumes for the Operas Lampedusa (Plymouth, UK) and The Mother of Fishes (Pittsburgh, USA). Hedy is music composer for several short films such as Dead Body, Grand Theatre and Picture Palace, Bees Mecanique, the TV episode Green and Blue and the feature films Salaat and Deccani Souls. Her interest in interlacing sonic and digital art with traditional folk performance practices led her to create a prototype body instrument inspired by the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey called Dervish Sound Dress (2018) that combines music, wearable body technology and live performance. She has a BFA in Visual Arts from York University (Toronto) and a ResM in Computer Music from the University of Plymouth and is currently associate lecturer in Digital Art and Technology where she is completing her PhD.
charminarfilms.com

Kaz Rahman

Artistic Director

Kaz Rahman has worked extensively as Visual Artist, Filmmaker and Academic with both commercial and public institutions, festivals and broadcasters over the last 20 years. His work has played in film festivals and venues such as Anthology Film Archives (New York City), National Film Board of Canada (Toronto), India Habitat Centre (New Delhi), Salar Jung Museum (Hyderabad), Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), The San Jose Museum of Art (California), Bogazici Film Festival (Istanbul), SUFICINE Festival (Konya) and broadcast on TV24 (Turkey) and has been featured in publications such as The Times of India, The Hindu, The New Indian Express (India), Daily Sabah and Star Gazette (Turkey). Read full bio

Advisory Board

Andres Tapia-Urzua

Filmmaker and Video Artist

Andres Tapia-Urzua / ATU is a filmmaker and multimedia artist practicing in video, music, performance and installation. Fusing aesthetics, theory and political issues, his work frequently explores the liminality of an identity in constant intersection between culture and technology. Tapia-Urzua offers us a poignant and fascinating look at contemporary society where social alienation, high-tech environments and the poetics of globaliaation are represented in sharp and accessible ways. His visual proposal also considers the concept of cultural hybridity recognising the current exchange, bond and tension among different societies after complex relationships of colonial dependency in coexistence. Read full bio

Bilal Hashmi

Publisher at Quattro Books

Bilal Hashmi is the Executive Director and Publisher of Quattro Books (Toronto, Canada). He is also a translator working in English, French, Hindi, Persian and Urdu. He teaches Urdu at the University of Toronto and presently serves as the president of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada/Association des traducteurs et traductrices litteěraires du Canada.
www.quattrobooks.ca

Celaleddin Çelik

Architect at NUN and Musician

Celaleddin Çelik graduated from Kadikoy Anatolian High School and received his Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Istanbul). He is currently teaching at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University Architectural Design Studio and is the producer/host of the TV show Gelenekten Gelecege (From the Tradition to the Future). Celik is a member of the Art Consultancy Committee of Istanbul Ataturk Cultural Center and the Interdisciplinary Committee of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. He has won various prizes in competitions and has run the architectural practice NUN | Architecture & Design since 2013.
nunarch.com

Dan Paolantonio

Co-Founder & Co-Director, Imperfect Cinema

Dan Paolantonio is an academic and filmmaker whose wide-ranging practice has encompassed everything from international film festival curation, artists film & video and experimental documentary to television commercials. As the co-founder and co-director of Imperfect Cinema, Dan has produced events across the UK, in continental Europe, and the USA, working with partners such as Supersonic Festival (Birmingham, UK), Situated Cinemas (Vienna, Austria) and Interstate Galleries (New York, USA). Dan’s current film work seeks to aestheticize constructed communal spaces and to explore these by foregrounding the formal qualities of ritual. Dan is currently a Lecturer in Creative Media and Filmmaking at The University of Plymouth.
imperfectcinema.com

Murray Smith

Professor of Philosophy, Art and Film

Murray Smith is Professor of Philosophy, Art and Film at the University of Kent (since 2000) and co-director of the Aesthetics Research Centre. He is also past President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and has served as Director of Research in the Faculty of Humanities (2008) and held the roles of Head of Film Studies (1999-2003 and 2007-8), Director of Research for Drama, Film and Visual Arts (2001-4) and Leverhulme Research Fellow (2005-6). Read full bio

Peren Birsaygılı Mut

Writer and Documentary Scenarist

Peren Birsaygılı Mut was born in Izmir, Turkey and has been interested in literature since youth. She has worked as scriptwriter and researcher on several multi-episode Documentary projects for TRT Turk such as Memories and Emotions in the Footsteps of Recent History (2008) related to the Ottoman Empire’s WWI withdrawal from the Middle East, Traces of Turks in Africa (2008-09) and Yesterday Today Tomorrow (2011-12). With the production company Farabi Film she has worked on projects for Al Jazeera Arabic and English such as Turkish-Arab Relations Throughout History (2010) and Common Pain 1915 (2011) and was Producer as well as Scriptwriter on several TRT Documentaries series such as Fifty-Five Day Story - Western Thrace Turkish Republic (2014) Love in Exile (2016) and Untold Story of Squares- Marrakesh (2018). Read full bio

Sathyabhama Madathil

Theatre Director and Academic

Sathyabhama has been working as a theatre practitioner in India for the past two decades and is the director and Trustee of Ananta Performing Arts and Research Center. She completed a 3 year post-graduation diploma from the National School of Drama, New Delhi with a specialisation in Theatre Design and Techniques (2008) and also completed a research fellowship under the Ministry of Culture titled Space, Body, and Design in the traditional rituals of India. She has received many grants and endowments such as the G. Shankarapilla Endowment award from Calicut University (2004) and was part of the India-China Cultural exchange Program (2011). Read full bio