Post-Representational Curating: Militating Through the Archive

Post-Representational Curating: Militating through the Archive

a lecture by

Dr. Vali Mahlouji

This lecture will discuss the working methodology of the curatorial think tank Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) through an examination of two open-ended case studies. AOTFD concerns itself with histories of nations condemned by social displacement, cultural annihilation or deliberate disappearance. It engages with accounts of culture lost through material destruction, acts of censorship, and other political, economic or human contingencies. This practice enacts processual retracing (historical) and reintegration (now) into cultural memory and discourse, as a performative counteraction of violent, systemic historical erasures.

The tripartite reclaiming, reconstructing and ultimately reconciling is set in motion through a performative retroactive agitation. Here the archive is re-situated beyond the hierarchies and strictures of the state/institutional apparatus. It is understood instead as a discourse that intervenes in and disrupts hegemonic historical narratives.

Confronting the decade long controversial Festival of Arts Shiraz-Persepolis and the seminal photographic series Prostitute of Kaveh Golestan as contrapuntal historical objects, Archaeology of the Final Decade has collected and salvaged documents and cultural materials relating to both articulations. The former was a festival of performance held annually in Iran between 1967-77, in and around the city of Shiraz and the ancient ruins of Persepolis, until a fatwa declared it culturally decadent and un-Islamic. The latter is centred on the last extant photographic record of the residents of the red light district of Tehran – the Citadel of Shahr-e No – before it was torched down with an undisclosed number of residents trapped inside in an epic act of cultural cleansing. The neighbourhood was subsequently bulldozed and converted into a park. The project Recreating the Citadel investigates the nature and function of such cultural deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation as a tool of political and cultural reordering of society in post-1979 revolutionary Iran.