Wednesday seminar: Dance Party Revolution: Oslo

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this autumn, where we explore minor gestures. Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

What kind of migratory Iranian home party could, through music, dance, and food, throw the confines of nationalist traditions off beat? It is the question at the heart of artist Afrang Nordlöf Malekian’s artistic research project “Dance Party Revolution”, which engages with Iranian home party culture in Europe. By applying Asef Bayat’s concept to mehmani, Afrang situates this joyful practice within everyday, covert resistance – a “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” – to explore how dispersed individuals, through shared, embodied practices, might subvert tradition. In a time when futures seem increasingly stolen by war and militarization, this seminar looks into how mehmani or other social nonmovements might be sites where the improbable – even the seemingly impossible – can triumph against nationalist imaginaries.

During the seminar, Afrang will present his “Dance Party Revolution”, which will be followed by a joint discussion on Asef Bayat's work.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is an Iranian-Swedish artist whose practice is informed by political tensions in informal cultural spaces: at the dinner table or at mehmani – Iranian home parties – where voices interrupt each other, memories diverge, and choreography is negotiated. These frictions shape his work, engaging with those who were not allowed to speak at the dinner table or whose political practices were dismissed. Nordlöf Malekian learns from their silenced language and, through comedy, kitsch, and queerness, creates performances and documents he wishes had existed in certain contexts, opening toward larger worlds of coming together. Nordlöf Malekian has previously conducted artistic research at the Arab Image Foundation, was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and was awarded the Maria Bonnier Dahlin grant in 2025. His work has been exhibited at venues including the 10th Berlin Biennale, Sophiensaele, Moderna Museet, and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is currently working on the social practice commission Dance Party Revolution: Oslo at UKS in Oslo, an ongoing research project on Iranian home party culture in Oslo, presented through a series of workshops, screenings, performances, and a final exhibition in spring 2027.

Please read the attached text before the seminar. Bayat, Asef. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009.