Svarvargatan 2, SE-112 49 Stockholm +46 (0)8-651 84 26 info@filmform.com Newsletter MORE

HIDE

In the Dermis of History
BY
Behzad Khosravi Noori

At the intersection of Felestin (Palestine) Street and Talaghani Street, in the middle of a large roundabout, there is an allegorical bronze-and-cement sculpture. Depicting several figures, one with a fist raised in a gesture of defiance, the work is a monument to the Palestinian struggle and the First Intifada in particular. The First Intifada was an unceasing succession of Palestinian remonstrations against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It lasted from December 1987 until the Madrid Conference in 1991, and it was precisely during this period that construction of the monument took place, from 1989 until its inauguration in 1990. The sculpture was the first public monument ever built-in postrevolutionary Tehran.

This film is about the monument at the center of Tehran and its historical background. Here, the analysis goes beyond the physical place to address the phantasmagorias and spatiality that surround it, viewed through the lens of the contemporary history of art and politics. The monument in Tehran is a site- and context-specific example that serves as a conceptual point of departure for a diverse array of analogous political contexts and historical entanglements.

This film presents the research process through the frame of archival materials unearthed in the course of a collaborative filmmaking project, juxtaposing analysis and commentary on this footage with the materiality of the monument and Felestin Square. By elaborating on the relationship between two hyper-politicized social environments—Palestine and Iran. 

Aspect ratio 1.78:1 (16:9)
Prod. format
Duration 00:23:21
Language No dialogue
Color Color
Sound Stereo
Year 2021
Rent this work for public screenings

About the artist

Behzad Khosravi Noori

Behzad Khosravi Noori, Ph.D is an artist, writer, educator, playgrounder, and necromancer. His research-based practice includes films, installations, as well as archival studies.

His works investigate histories from The Global South, labor and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter narration to the east-west dichotomy during the Cold War. By bringing multiple subjects into his study, he explores possible correspondences seen through the lenses of contemporary art practice, proletarianism, subalternity, and the technology of image production. He analyses contemporary history to revisit memories beyond borders, exploring the entanglements and non/aligned memories. Behzad Khosravi Noori uses personal experience as a springboard to establish, through artistic research, a hypothetical relationship between personal memories and significant world events between micro and macro histories. His works emphasize films and historical materials to bring the questions such as what happens to the narration when it crosses the border? What is the future of our collective past? In his practice, he reflects upon the marginalia of artistic explorations in relation to art, the history of trans-culturalism, and global politics.

His ongoing artistic research project, The landscape of Imagination, analyses archival photographs captured with a camera known in the Urdu language as the “Soul Catcher” in relation to backdrop painting in the context of the Global South.
The search to propose a transdisciplinary practice point to the complexity of the subject and context of the inquiry and how substructures perform in creating connections between seemingly irreconcilable arenas and forms of urban life and its transnational characteristics.

Khosravi Noori’s works have been shown at Kalmar Museum, Malmö art Museum,
Venice Biennale,Timișoara Biennale, Ural industrial biennale, 12.0 Contemporary Islamabad, Tensta Konsthall, Sakakini art institution Ramallah Palestine, HDLU Zagreb, WHW Zagreb, Botkyrka Konsthall, CFF (Centre of Photography, Stockholm), Marabouparken, Stockholm, Centre of Contemporary art, Riga, Arran Gallery Tehran, among other venues.
He is a member of the editorial board of VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research.

WORKS BY SAME ARTIST

SHOW ALL WORKS