#13 If Need Be

If Need Be presents a constellation of stories about water scarcity in the arid regions of Central Asia, ancient Persia, and the American Great Plains. Artist duo Pejvak strings together a series of hallucinatory events involving artificial glaciers, dams and other human attempts to bring water under control. Giving equal weight to gossip, legend and historical fact, Pejvak takes the role of an unreliable narrator, situating the struggle for water within the struggle for the historical record.

This publication was made as a continuation of If Need Be, an exhibition by Pejvak at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium (12.06. – 22.08.2021). The exhibition was curated by Tim Roerig.

Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari since 2014. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with like-minded collaborators, histories and various geographies.

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Authors: Anisa Sabiri, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt & Sasha Shestakova), Benjamin Filler, Irakli Qolbaia, Dina Cheraghvand, Farshad Tavakoli, Masoud Borbor and Pejvak
Research assistants: Dina Cheraghvand, Hamid Ghezlou, Lisa Vetkhova

Illuminator: Mojtaba Abu Talebi

Calligrapher: Javad Azari

© Photos by Elmer Driessen