Deep dive: Lecture by Mahdis Azarmandi

Inheriting Revolution—On Iran the question of war and peace

Drawing from her research within Peace and Conflict Studies, Mahdis Azarmandi will present a lecture that provides insight into the complex context which plays a significant role in the artwork of Selina Ersahdi, exploring revolution, diaspora, and the present moment of war.

The lecture will take Iran as a point of departure, reflecting on what it means to inherit a revolution across generations, particularly in exile, where its histories arrive unevenly, carried through fragments, silences, and memory. For those shaped by it at a distance, what is inherited is not the loss of the revolution itself, but a rupture from it: a separation from the conditions of staying, participating, and continuing its struggles, alongside the persistence of its political horizons.

Against the backdrop of ongoing military escalation and threats to Iranian sovereignty, the lecture considers why Iran remains so difficult to imagine politically, and how orientalist notions shape not only Western narratives but also diasporic understandings of who we are and where we are from. Situating the present within a broader imperial order, Mahdis examines how war and peace are defined and distributed through global systems of power, systems that cannot be separated from histories of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In doing so, she asks what it means to speak of peace in such a moment, and where a politics of refusal or solidarity might still be found.

WHAT TO EXPECT

This event is free.
This event is held in the gallery at Artspace Aotearoa.
This location is accessible.
This event is seated and uses a microphone

Biography

Dr. Mhadis Azarmandi is a scholar of Peace and Conflict Studies whose work examines how war and peace are shaped within a global system structured by imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism. She currently works at the University of Canterbury, in the Faculty of Education, School of Social and Cultural Studies in Education. Her teaching and research connect peace studies with questions of justice, focusing on how systems of power shape knowledge, institutions, and everyday life. Her interdisciplinary work spans education, antiracism and memory work, examining how histories of violence and struggle are carried, contested, and reinterpreted across different contexts.

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