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The Second Saturday Lone Star Arts District event at 107 Lone Star happens once a month. Artists open up their studios to folks who are just ambling by.
Photographer Ramin Samandari is one of those artists. Samandari grew up in Iran but left his home country in 2007. He’s attended dozens of Iran protests here in Texas since then, and his current exhibit feature photos from those protests.
“Outside of Iran, there's not a whole lot we can do, other than just stand in solidarity with the people in Iran who are living with this and dying day to day,” he said.
The Second Saturday event is happening on Saturday and has the artists there opening their studios to the public for a neat urban party. And his photo exhibit goes deep into this theme.
“I've been photographing, going to as many of these events that I can, since 2009. In 2009 was a big demonstration in Austin,” Samandari said. “People from San Antonio came and that was right after the sham election of Ahmadinejad that they basically stole the election. And thousands of people marched in the street in Austin. So it starts from there and continues to the most recent ones.”
Samandari can’t help but see a recurring theme in recent American demonstrations, wherein the hopes of freedom-loving Americans are sometimes dashed by those to whom freedom means little.
This theme and others inspired photographic artist Ramin Samandari to build an exhibit on protests by Americans — and ex-Iranians — in San Antonio and Austin. He shot pictures about the protests here, but protests held in Iran triggered a very violent response.
“This recent crackdown and mass killings that have been unprecedented. I went through all the images and put together sort of a collage-type photographic exhibit where the pictures are not individually printed and framed or anything like that,” he said. “It's just I printed them on long rolls, so a combination of multitudes of images from all these events that I've gone to,” Samandari said.
His Magical Realism Studio in the Lone Star Arts District will be open to the public this Saturday night.
“When it comes to something that's happening on the other side of the planet, and news directly doesn't really come out of Iran, other than the news that the authorities want to put out, there's no foreign journalists stationed in Iran to report directly,” he said.
There are those who think protest is a waste of time. Not Samandari. "I think it matters. It matters for people to show solidarity and show their displeasure,” he said.
