In this presentation, I created a rewriting of history in the form of a series of speculative events that parallel reality and draw upon the political and historical knowledge I have accumulated whilst living both in Iran and in Canada. The narrative’s anchoring theme is the means of control and discipline that the State imposes upon citizens.
Beginning with Berlin’s 1942 Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the story then moves to the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, a reference to the psychological experiments conducted by the government on its citizens in 1950s. The narrative concludes in Tehran’s Towhid Prison, where the artist’s father was detained as a political prisoner in 1979. Here, text, images, videos, and objects are layered and interwoven to create an unstable narrative to be deciphered by the viewer and elaborated upon during a performance by myself.
2018
Lecture-performance (single-channel video projection, text, tapes)
colour/sound 25 min (approx.)