Parallel Circuit announces “O! Nassaji: The Hope of an Exhausted City,” an exhibition by Mohammad Kalantari. The show will open on Friday, December 15, 2023, and continue through January 12, 2024. “O! Nassaji: The Hope of an Exhausted City,” marking the artist’s first collaboration with Dastan, includes printmaking on textile, photographs, video, installations, and a sculpture. 

Defining the project as an “intersection between visual culture, revisionist historiography, urban sociological studies as well as exploring the effects of industrialization and shifts in everyday life,” the artist has set to focus on two modern establishments in the northern Iranian city of Qaem-Shahr: Nassaji Qaem-Shahr Football Club and Nassaji Mazandaran Textile Industries Company. 

Founded in 1930 as part of the initiatives to modernize Iran, Nassaji Mazandaran Textile Industries Company was the largest textile manufacturing plant in the Middle East. For generations, its factories have played an essential role in many aspects life in Qaem-Shahr, including its economy and agriculture, as well as its culture, social, and urban life. However, in recent years, much of its production lines have been closed and abandoned, leaving behind a population once dependent on the economic opportunities it provided: jobs were lost, agricultural production, especially cotton farming, had to be cut down, and many of the people employed in the plants had to migrate elsewhere.