Panel Discussion Marco Polo meets Nasser Khosrow with Golrokh Nafisi, Sam Samiee and Summaya Kassim at Vartan House for Pejman Foundation and Tehran Art Week, Tehran January 2019
In the panel discussion “Marco Polo meets Nasser Khosrow” — each speaker gives a commentary on two medieval travelers, Nasser Khosrow and Marco Polo, who, as in today’s contemporary art world shaped through travels, had engaged in mapping the worlds as they themselves knew at the time. Golrokh Nafisi and Giulia Crispiani elaborate on Khosrow and Polo as distinct among their contemporaries: the travelers engaged not only in market practices and mercantile activity but used these as excuses for broader interests such as culture and knowledge, first as narrators and later on as subjects of literature.
Summaya Kassem Ali and Sam Samiee respond with an elaboration of the anthropological aspects of markets and cultures, cultural mobility and histories of the market, movement, and colonial impacts on the remembering of ideational distinctions. You can watch the video here. The text in Farsi is here.