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NOTES ON CURATORIAL PRACTICE
I approach programming as a form of research and argument conducted through films, but also through the material and institutional conditions that allow them to become public. I do not work from a fixed curatorial template: the form of a programme should emerge from the historical or aesthetic question it is trying to make perceptible.
This has produced projects of quite different kinds. Cinema-ye Azad combines archival recovery, historical research and repeated exhibition to reconstruct an alternative Iranian film culture whose films and records remain scattered. Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema approached a critic through the films around which his thought developed, bringing screenings into relation with commissioned introductions, texts, translations and publication. In Focus: Amir Naderi used three UK premieres to reconsider the critical narrative around a filmmaker whose international work has remained less visible than the Iranian films through which he is usually discussed. Not By Lynch instead constructs a constellation across film history, testing the “Lynchian” as a sensibility that precedes and exceeds David Lynch himself.
Across these projects, selection is only one part of programming. Rights and materials, archival access, translation, writing, restoration, publication, venue and the circumstances of viewing can all alter what a programme is able to say. I am interested in the point at which curatorial propositions encounter these conditions—not as practical matters external to programming, but as part of the process through which its arguments take form.
Programming also frequently develops alongside my work as a critic and researcher. With Cinema-ye Azad, archival discoveries reshape subsequent screenings while exhibition generates new contacts and possibilities for recovery. Not By Lynch commissions new criticism to test and complicate the relationships proposed by the programme. The Daney season connected films to writing, translation and discussion, while the Naderi programme used exhibition to reopen an established account of a filmmaker’s career. Rather than treating contextual writing as supplementary to a screening, I am interested in what happens when criticism and exhibition develop in relation to one another.
The aim is not simply to recover films or organise them around themes, but to create conditions in which their histories, relations and contradictions can become newly perceptible.
PROJECTS
Cinema-ye Azad
Ongoing · 2025–
ICA · Cube Cinema · UCLA Film & Television Archive · Barbican · IFFR
An ongoing curatorial and research project recovering Iran’s independent 8mm filmmaking movement of 1969–79, developed through archival research, new writing and repeated presentations in collaboration with Shaghayegh Raoufi and Hadi Alipanah.
Not By Lynch: The Lynchian Before and After David Lynch
The Cinema Museum, London · 2026
A year-long nine-film season examining the “Lynchian” not as a genealogy of influence but as a recurring cinematic sensibility, with each screening accompanied by newly commissioned criticism, a printed booklet and original promotional material.
Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema
ICA London / Sabzian · 2025
A twelve-film season across ten programmes returning to Serge Daney through the cinema around which his criticism developed, accompanied by guest introductions, screening texts, new translations, a bilingual dossier and later Persian-language publication.
In Focus: Amir Naderi
ICA London · 2025
Three UK premieres focusing on Naderi’s comparatively neglected international filmmaking, from his New York work to the Japanese production Cut, presented with the filmmaker’s participation.
