I walked down the steps on the northeast corner of First Avenue and South Main Street in Pioneer Square and expected to find the founders of ANTiPODE at the bar. Instead, a live saxophone blast from a kid who couldn’t have been more than 15 hit me from the small stage to the right. Past the front room, I found Amir Amini, cofounder of the gallery space and arts center, in a back stairwell helping to move a large piece of furniture wrapped in a blanket.
While he tended to this task, Saina Heshmati, also cofounder, and warm and welcoming, chatted with me about the art in the room she curated. We sat in a small office space made from makeshift walls, drank Colombian coffee (roasted by a couple from Colombia now living in Seattle), and Amini joined us, flustered but ready. A friend visiting the two from out of town—a teacher, German but living in San Diego—sat in the space with us, minding her business on her laptop, while the band, a group from Seattle Jazz Fellowship, played as we talked, reaching a crescendo as our conversation did.
In this handsome basement gallery and arts center, you can now take a book out from their new library (off the bookshelf Amini was helping Arne Pihl, the maker, move in). You can also see art unlike any in the city, hear experimental music, watch rare films or a dance performance, and take a workshop or write alongside other members on Saturday afternoons. Between the rolling gallery walls they built themselves, the exposed brick, and the polished wood bar, there is a balance of scrappy and polished, sincerity and playfulness, hyperlocal and global.
Saina Heshmati (artist, designer, and curator) and Amir Amini (research scientist, self-proclaimed wannabe writer, and general multi-hyphenate) are two self-described “jet-lagged immigrants from Tehran.” The gallery’s name refers to points on Earth that are opposite one another, or a point on Earth directly across from another through the planet’s core. The concept behind the gallery’s name is that Tehran is a cultural antipode to Seattle, and they’re engaged in the dynamic and beautiful contrast.
The ANTiPODE website states that the space exists “to use the immigrant experience to create an ‘art bridge’ between Seattle and other cities. We are interested in cities because, unlike countries, cities are tangible. We can hate them, love them, live in them, leave them—and as immigrants, they can live together inside us.”
Heshmati and Amini left Tehran two days apart after the Green Movement in 2009, a protest against election fraud in the Iranian government. Of this migration, which was of significant size, Amini said, “When you come with such a wave, you’re not being pulled by the destination, you are being pushed… you don’t know why you’re here. You [only] know why you left.” It took a while before either of them felt ready to have something to say in Seattle, but eventually they felt they had a lot to contribute.
“There are a lot of opposite aspects in the two cities,” Amini said. “Seattle is very supportive. I don’t think we could do this in Tehran or in New York. People are really open and thirsty [here].” And then there are the darker insights that come from holding them up to each other. “Seattle kind of avoids pain,” Amini said. “It’s kind of conservative in that way. Tehran is more about living for today, for pleasure and pain because there’s no tomorrow, or tomorrow is always worse. You’re getting there in the US, I think.”
We spoke about how thousands of protesters are currently being systematically murdered and maimed by the government in their first home, and how it felt for them to be here in Seattle.
“About an hour ago, a friend of mine [in Iran] connected to the internet after eight or nine or 12 days [of no connection]. Saina and I were coming to ANTiPODE to get the bookshelf. I couldn’t tell my friend, Hey, I have to leave. The phone was working. The quality of the internet wasn’t good enough to have a phone call, but it was good enough to text. So I sat and texted with him.”
Right now, the terror in Iran is an unavoidable part of their having two homes. “It’s leaving a home,” Amini said, “then coming here and trying to recreate it. The other home [continues to] fully exist while you also tend to life here. And it never ends. You come to define yourself as something in between… an agent, switching between each life, unseen.”
For this reason and many others, Heshmati and Amini present immigrant artists from a position of power. They’re not interested in objectifying anyone’s experience, but in making room for complex perspectives and stories to be told. This is about creative freedom and resisting an industrialized art market that feeds a polarized political system.
ANTiPODE also prioritizes young artists and artists early in their career. They’re committed to presenting 70 percent immigrant artists and 30 percent locals. The gallery is designed to make room for experimental forms, video, performance, and more.
This month, on March 5, check out their opening for Esra Güler, an artist from Istanbul who’s been showing work in Seattle for years. The pieces are paintings but feature charcoal and illustration. Heshmati described the show as “a little dark and quite brave.” The artist will also give a talk on March 28.
On March 15, they’ll feature an experimental performance to the music of traditional Persian instruments and sound artists. As for literary happenings, you’ll find me at the gallery on the second Saturday of every month to write and share work.
Come for the art, stay for the radical intellectual community with an absurdist sense of humor.
