Seeing Studies

Seeing Studies investigates the ways we learn “to see.” Based on a schoolbook published by the Iranian Ministry of Education to teach art in the first year of Iranian public middle school, this bilingual publication (English/Farsi) embarks on a collaborative journey, visiting different “schools of seeing.” The institute for incongruous translation invited contributors and interlocutors to propose solutions to the problems posed by dissonant visual languages. These proposals take shape as words, pictures, numbers, objects, practices, and concepts—in sum, “things” coexisting in multiple configurations. Tenuous relations are drawn up between things as they take up positions in relation to a problem. Throughout this voyage, seeing is understood as a radical and expanded process of translation. How to look, read, and depict come together to form systems of “agreements” within which their “meanings” are constantly extended, transformed, and reassigned.