Davood MADADPOOR | Cultural Practitioner / Curator / Photographer

Davood Madadpoor, b. 1981, Tehran Iran.
Davood was born and raised in Tehran, where he began his career at the War Library as a co-researcher on methods of archiving. His interests in the arts led him to pursue degrees in photography at the Iranian Photographers’ House and the Tehran University of Applied Sciences and Technology.

He furthered his studies in Florence, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and a master’s degree in curatorial studies from the Accademia di Belle Arti. Here, he cultivated and explored his curatorial interests in the relationship between art practices and the material reality of day-to-day life, graduating with a thesis focused on local context as an impetus and inspiration for the art practices of artists-in-residence.

Until December 2022, he worked as a curatorial assistant at Villa Romana in Florence. In this capacity, he co-curated and assisted several projects, including Manifestiamo, The Tellers, The Broken Archive, Scuola Popolare I & II, and Seeds for Future Memories, among others. He co-founded Sumac Space in October 2020, an ongoing project dedicated to art practices of the Middle East, addressing sociopolitical themes through exhibitions, dialogue, and collaboration that emphasizes critical thinking in creative practice. In January 2023, he relocated to Berlin, where he continued his work, developing and contributing to various projects including Echoes, au-delà, and Generative Encounters.

The rest of his time is devoted to developing his research, aligned with Sumac Space, which revolves around interrogating and recasting everyday events against the contemporary backdrop of a sociopolitical landscape in flux. As a curator, Davood seeks to explore this tension in his projects through narration, storytelling, and fiction that reconstruct the contemporary day-to-day as a mixture of origin, transition, and an unknowable future.