Kalender

Undoing Images I

Ala Younis, derzeitige Künstlerische Leitung der Akademie der Künste der Welt, Künstlerin und Architektin, präsentiert im Rahmen des Pilotprojekts NEW CURATORS eine Auswahl an Kurzfilmen.

FILMPROGRAMM
THE BLUE INK POCKET (2022, 11'), Ali Eyal
In the village, we managed to retrieve the lost pieces of the artist’s roving duplicates. The village artist drew copies of himself with complicated stories that he shared in the galleries from around the world, since he couldn’t travel with his duplicates. This was both an artistic style and his position towards the politics that obstruct the movement of the artist with his work and his Western audience. He had a group of drawings of the strongest passports from around the world that he produced with cheap paint on cigarette boxes. With each story, he created a duplicate of himself as he placed a passport in the pocket of a drawn shirt. This copy of THE BLUE INK POCKET, AND is the only one we possess.
Aside from an old letter that the artist wrote in 2022 for a collective he joined, nothing remains except the signature and the phrase “Good luck.” The words were consumed by the farm’s larvae in the basement, but traces of the pen’s power remain on the back of the paper.

ONE IMAGE, TWO ACTS (2020, 44'), Sanaz Sohrabi
The establishment of Iran’s petroleum industrial complex in 1908 is entangled with the formation of media and visual infrastructures which propelled and sustained new ideologies and modes of identification with the emergent colonial modernity in Iran. Between 1908-1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) -currently British Petroleum (BP)- strategically utilized ethnographic film and photography production to promote and represent its colonial developments in Iran. Investigating the relationship between petro-modernity and photography and film as technologies of coloniality, ONE IMAGE, TWO ACTS unpacks the spatial and cultural manifestation of this emergent image economy which operated in tandem with the larger petroleum complex.

With a particular focus on the historical ethnographic film and photographic surveys produced by the BP, ONE IMAGE, TWO ACTS examines the formations of early modernist infrastructures of leisure such as cinemas vis-à-vis the broader social engineering project and asymmetries of power in the oil towns of South-Western Iran. Unraveling the social spaces of leisure in relation to industrial spaces of labor, this film connects and maps the cognitive and formal structures of modernist ideas of time, leisure, and desire during the oil company’s operations in Iran. This emergent oil encounter was not limited to the oil company’s colonial expansion; the multifaceted infrastructures of petroleum industry accumulated incrementally and temporally, produced political assets, and shaped politics along the way. This film examines the ways in which the oil company’s visual regimes of petro-modernity were reclaimed and countered by a growing anti-colonial cinema in which oil was a protagonist and cinemas had become the contested emblem of colonial development.

Reading the Iranian New Wave cinema against the backdrop of growing raw material sovereignty and nationalization movement, this film analyzes two integral films of this period, namely A FIRE by Ebrahim Golestan (1961) and Amir Naderi’s THE RUNNER (1984). It reframes oil not solely as an exchangeable commodity but rather as an archive itself; one that constitutes a web of imaginations, aspirations, and struggles. ONE IMAGE, TWO ACTS is a coalescence of infrastructures, images, and archives of oil wherein cinematic time and geological time mobilize different sites, temporalities, and numerous material modalities.