PORTRAIT OR LANDSCAPE, ANAHITA?
Portrait or landscape, Anahita? is an exhibition by Sepideh Behrouzian at with the rubbles of old palaces, showing her film of the same title. Her work follows the continuous shaping of a colonial frontier: from oil-mining as a colonial practice, spanning through the promise of development becoming the new placeholder for “overcome” extractive colonial practices, all the way to a flattened representation of a dystopian climate devastation that obscures its asymmetrical effects.
This colonial frontier has dispossessed both land and bodies by creating a disciplinary boundary separating biology from geology, the private from the public, and the traditional from the modern. Despite this, the oppressive incisions reveal parallel scars that can unite when joint, forming new kinships beyond the constraints of disciplinary divisions, often determined by race, gender and social class.
Sepideh Behrouzian has taken the desiccated riverbed of Zayendeh Rud in Esfahan, her hometown, as a site where the spectres of geology and biology convene: ghosts that emerge when the haunted, dry river discharges its secrets.
Anahita, as a proposed figure, transcends being a mere ancient goddess of water. She is embodied as a speculative amalgamation of diverse entities, capable of shapeshifting and adapting, of staying with the trouble. Her presence serves as a haunting reminder of the suppression of nature and those who have been “othered”, relegated to the status of mere objects of acquisition on the horizon.
In pursuit of Anahita’s non-patriarchal time and space, Sepideh Behrouzian employs autobiographical fiction, poetry, and filmed footage intertwined with representational historical materials. The film delves into the concealed violence lurking beneath discourses of progress and civilisation. Portrait or landscape, Anahita? challenges the dichotomous approach towards nature as either “an outside wilderness that must be tamed” or as “pure, scarce and untamable, in need for protection”. It exposes the intersecting exploitations of gendered and racialised bodies with that of environmental resources.
This is a ghost story from the past and the future that haunts the here and now. The ghosts only make their presence apparent when the flow of the river is disrupted, signalling that a haunting is taking place. No one sets foot in the empty riverbed, except during social and political protests against injustice. As if seemingly useless for construction or cultivation, the desolate wasteland of the dry river becomes a political space and a site for ghosts to assemble. The ghost of Anahita and other apparitions…
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
Poster design by Socis Club.
21st October to 17th of November 2023
Opening: 21st of October 2023, 6PM until late
OPENING POSTPONED TO THE 21ST AT 18.00 DUE TO GENERAL STRIKE.
To come visit the exhibition, please contact us for an appointment:
info@withtherubbles.org / @withtherubblesofoldpalaces
with the rubbles of old palaces is currently not wheelchair accessible,
please contact our email address for online access to the exhibition’s film.
Sepideh Behrouzian: artist, film direction, research, script writing, collection and production the visual materials and voiceover / Masoud Amo Taghi: camera / Arsalan Akrami: technical editing / Tara Jamali: performance development and performer / Fateme Bagheri: voiceover and performer / Pablo Giménez Arteaga: spatial audio design and installation / Shakeeb Sharifzadeh: sound designer / Mohesen Sharifian: sound recordist and voiceover training / Payyam Entekhabi: donated photographs from his archive for the film and gave access to his collection of talismans collected from the river bed / Amir Habibi: additional special effects / Hannah O’Flynn: curation / Socis Club: graphic design / Tian Guoxin: exhibition set up / The film contains fragments of “Linguistics Of Atoms” Composed and Performed by Felicia Atkinson, who kindly gave permission to use them.
