Sarazad is an independent bilingual platform for artistic research, writing and dialogue. It examines the relations among art, politics, society, history and education, with particular attention to forms of knowledge and experience that dominant structures push towards the margins.
Sarazad began through conversations among a small group of people working in different artistic and educational contexts. Its formation responded to the closure and disappearance of independent spaces in Iran, and to the growing need for places where people could gather, write, think and work together. The platform has developed through friendship, shared labour and the support of contributors who have sustained it without institutional or commercial interest. It remains intentionally situated between amateur commitment and professional practice, and much of its work has been supported by the educational labour of its members.
In architecture, a cantilever is anchored at one end while the other extends beyond the body that supports it. The Persian word Sarazad names this condition. The platform is grounded in social life, companionship and collective responsibility, while reaching into different historical, geographical and disciplinary territories.
Sarazad approaches art not as a separate sphere but as something produced through material relations with the world and with others. Its publications and projects investigate how art, politics, society, history and education shape one another. Sarazad does not seek simply to represent marginalised people or to speak on their behalf. It questions the structures of representation that produce marginality, and works towards a polyphonic space in which different gendered, linguistic, geographical and class positions can participate in the production of knowledge.
Sarazad describes its approach as artistic re-search. The hyphen signals a return to searching: a process of questioning, revisiting and testing the established forms through which knowledge and art are produced. Research is understood here as a situated and political practice, shaped by social responsibility rather than detached from it. History is approached not as a single coherent account but as a field of partial, fragmented and unfinished histories, moving between concepts and lived experience, documents and memories, singular cases and larger structures.
Sarazad tries to practise its editorial commitments within its own working relationships. Looking, listening, questioning, reading, searching, making, undoing, connecting, sharing, disagreeing and returning are part of the same unfinished process. This statement is therefore not a fixed manifesto and will continue to change through the platform’s encounters and collaborations. Sarazad publishes original and translated work in Farsi and English. Not every contribution appears simultaneously in both languages, and translation is treated as an editorial and intellectual practice rather than as mechanical equivalence.
Sarazad