Project Description
The initiative Inner Journey Practices a.k.a “Honar e Seyr e Daroun” aims to support Iranians on their journey to a higher state of consciousness by offering lectures, practical workshops, creative content, and support groups using social media.
Instagram and WhatsApp are the only social media platforms that are not banned in Iran. Consequently, thirty percent of Iran’s eighty million population uses them for everything from entertainment, education, business, and general communication. With an open-source culture and potential for worldwide visibility, Instagram allows artists tremendous agency. In return, audiences can pick and choose whose world they want to be a part of. It works like this:
If you love something, you can bring it into your daily reality. And if you hate something, you never have to know about it.
Instagram allows for independence from institutions, agents, curators, galleries and publications because it enables artists to take on these roles themselves. Artists can even choose from a variety of ways to generate revenue. They can negotiate sales directly with buyers, generate passive income through ads if they manage to gather a large enough following, promote and raise funds for their projects, and pretty much do anything their heart thrives on.
As for me, I chose to make use of this platform to act on the utopian possibility I envision for Iran. With a small team, I now curate and share creative content by a wide range of artists without specific terms of identity such as gender, race, age, nationality, institutional status, or even genre. Our page features the work of authors, painters, sculptors, photographers, performers, designers, and illustrators from all over the world to inspire, empower, and inform our growing community.
If an image can be repurposed to serve our mission, we will humbly and respectfully appropriate it from the creatives we feature. As our code of ethics, we credit everyone and direct our community to delve deeper into their practices by sharing their name and tagging their page and website.
Our specific repurposing approach is to embed text in the images we post.
We’re aware that this is not a typical practice in physical art institutions. However, with its unique vernacular and culture, Instagram allows for the open-source model and collaboration.
The curation of our page is structured to feature four artists per week and one author for a more extended duration. The first and current author we’re working with is Dr. Jaiya John whose original English words can be found in the captions underneath each post.
As an extension to our page, we provide our community further support on WhatsApp by launching a new 21-Day challenge each month. We just concluded our first 21-Day challenge where participants committed to letting go of a destructive habit or implementing a constructive one into their lives. Our facilitators support participants with morning reminders, words of encouragement, check-ins at night, and inspirational video and sound content. To gage our impact, we regularly ask our community to provide us feedback and suggestions.
This month’s 21-Day challenge is titled, “I choose JOY”. In this challenge and opportunity, participants commit to unpacking what Joy means to them, and look for ways to embrace joy in spite of life’s challenges and struggles.
Although this initiative privileges Iranians, I wanted to offer English speakers a window into current Iran, Iranian conversations and the Farsi language by adding subtitles to one of my weekly Thursday LIVE talks on IGTV, and by sharing our Instagram page in this exhibition.
I believe there is no turning back to a pre-pandemic world and that the time is now to co-create new value systems that serve the greater whole.
We all know that transformation does not come without pain. Rebirth does not happen without loss and can feel both exciting and terribly daunting at the same time. My commitment with this initiative is to help make this transition a little easier and even exciting for our growing 5D community.
Welcome to @innerjourneypractices aka “Honor e sayr e daroun”