war Archives - Morehshin Allahyari

November 22, 2012

Re: Apologies to the many wonderful Iranians (2012)

Morehshin Allahyari – Re: Apologies to the many wonderful Iranians

Standing behind the windows; Unable to reach or to pass through. The past and present meeting in one spot; Places and objects slowly fragmenting, deforming, fading in and out, coming together, splitting apart; Witnessing things falling through…The blurry memories of my childhood from war, fusing into the same feelings of numbness and helplessness where I stand today…

Re: Apologies to the Many Wonderful Iranians is an installation that explores and combines personal memories of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) with the constant awareness of life filled with drumbeats of war against Iran and the intensified sanctions targeting the lives of the Iranian people. It is a response to the recent unethical and proud reports and discussions that praise sanctions and wars on Iran to stop the Iranian government’s nuclear activities; Rejecting and ignoring the results of sanctions on the lives of the ordinary people and their suffering; Forgetting the mentally and emotionally exhausted citizens, floating between political wars. Legitimatizing mass slaughter that sanctions accompany. Keeping the invisible war invisible without filling-in the gaps.

*In Summer of 2012, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times went to Iran and within his return to the U.S. in one of his reports named Pinched and Griping in Iran (June 2012) wrote:

“…with apologies to the many wonderful Iranians who showered me with hospitality, I favor sanctions because I don’t see any other way to pressure the regime on the nuclear issue or ease its grip on power. My takeaway is that sanctions are working pretty well.”

Morehshin Allahyari – Re: Apologies to the many wonderful Iranians

Photos by Derek Rankins.

Morehshin Allahyari - The Recitation of A Soliloquy

February 10, 2012

The Recitation of A Soliloquy (2012)

In 2012, I found a paragraph from my mother’s diary which was written when she was pregnant with me, during Iran-Iraq war. As a recitation of her diary, I’ve written every word 27 times on 27 frames of a 16mm film…. while projecting a Google Earth map of Iran on my face.

“Reading her Mother’s diary, one word-per-frame, under the lens of time accumulated since the time of it’s writing, and of her birth — the time of life. Virtual words, lifted off the page, wriggle like embryos under inquisitive gaze of an interlocutor to whom they are addressed, as if resisting to be born into the world in which war and cruelty are present.”

-Sandra Skurvida

Morehshin Allahyari – The Recitation of A Soliloquy

January 20, 2012

Over There Is Over Here (2011)

Over There Is Over Here explores the dialectics of time, space, real and unreal to define and explore the position of those who have left Iran versus the political prisoners.

The project uses 3D animation and data glitch as a way to illustrate presence-less presence and to show the passage and collapse of the time. In my recent trip to Iran, I found a picture of political prisoners, which is at least 100years old. Looking at the prisoners chained to each other, I saw a tragic relationship between the past and the present of Iran; a shared pain from the same soul, generation after generation. In my animation, the concept of time is used as a non-linear and collapsed concept in which the past and present have come together in order to create an “unreal” reality. Through a self-reflexive narrator, Over There Is Over Here alternates between the literary definition of a third person narrator to my actual, physical “third person” role outside Iran as narrator of the story. The narrator explores my relationship with imprisoned friends and classmates. In this relationship, I am the outsider who will always fail to understand the reality of a prisoner’s life. The more I live outside Iran, the more I will forget details of the “reality” of life inside Iran. For these reasons, the animation is a deliberate mix of real and unreal, fake and genuine.