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62
Les Prairies's artists
URIEL ORLOW
Remnants of the Future, 2010. Diffusion LUX. Courtesy of the artist.
Nasrin Tabatabai (born in 1961 in Iran) and Babak Afrassiabi (born in
1969 in Iran) had founded PAGES in 2004 in Rotterdam (Netherlands)
where they live nad work.
Uriel Orlow is concerned with the way collective
memory exists and the forms and figures that embody
it in reality (personalities, places, writings, or images).
In his film Remnants of the Future (2010), he explores
the ruins of Soviet ideology. The public housing estate
at Mush in the north of Armenia, was built in 1988 at the
behest of Mikhail Gorbachev in order to house people
displaced from the Stipak earthquake zone. But after
the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 the project was
left in the air. The estate, an idealistic communal living
project, is now inhabited only by temporary settlers and
scavengers who strip scrap metal out of the buildings.
This ghost city fits Foucault's notion of heterotopia,
insofar as, never having been finished, it does not
figure on any map – a phantasmagorical place even
though it exists. Mush is named after a city in Anatolia
in Eastern Turkey. It is the subject of Plans for the Past
(2012), the second part of Remnants of the Future. The
city of Mush in Anatolia also seems to have been
suspended in time. It was the scene of the massacre
of the Armenians, the first recognized genocide in
20th century history, although denied and disputed by
successive Turkish governments.
M. C. tr J. H.
Bron in 1973 in Zurich (Switzerland), lives and works
around London and Zurich.
NASRIN TABATABAI & BABAK AFRASSIABI (PAGES)
Through their research projects and their bilingual Anglo-Persian
journal, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi explore the historical,
political, and cultural conditions for the production of art in the specific
context of Iran. Two Archives (2011) combines two different sources: the
archives of the British Petroleum company (BP) and the collection of
modern Western art from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Teheran.
BP was in Iran from 1901 until 1951, when oil was nationalised and it
lost its monopoly. The BP archives document the history of the first oildrilling
operations in the Middle East. In 1970, when oil exports were at
their highest, the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art held the largest
collection in the Middle East, thanks to money from an oil company. In
the exhibition space, an assembly of two oil derricks and a copy of the
two open halves of a refinery ventilation housing stand as an echo of
modern sculpture. The video is a loop that overlays a shot of the workers
leaving the workplace with the same shot in reverse. Going home thus
becomes a return to the refinery. A replica of a photo album documents
the architecture of company housing, while a series of letters retraces a
correspondence about making a flattering and ideological documentary
about the company. The pictures are inspired by photographs in the
museum's reserves. The combination of these two archives makes
manifest the unfinished nature of Iran's modernity, which has been
partly fashioned by the oil economy since the early 20th century.
F. O. tr. J. H.
Wooden Oil Derrick Superimposed with Steel Oil
Derrick, Two Archives, 2011. Installation view, Badischer
Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (Allemagne) 2011.
Photography : Stephan Baumann.