KÜBA, a 40-monitor installation by Kutlug Ataman, takes its name form an area in Istanbul inhabited mostly by Kurdish migrants. In one section, Mehtap, one of the occupants of KÜBA – burdened by children, step-children, extreme poverty and without access to anything outside the immediate surroundings – tells us that she was very happy when she was a virgin. Happy before marriage, children, dislocation, domestic isolation and the trappings of a regulated adult life in extremely difficult circumstances. In the proliferation of narratives that grow to make up the site of KÜBA in this installation, we often hear of the clash between the drive to try and imagine a life and the demands of 'regulated experience'. In this instillation KÜBA becomes the performative space in which migrancy, poverty, cultural alienation, gender discrepancies, the state of living under the constant shadow of political hostility, etc’ are woven together into a large swathe of experiential narratives that together become the voice of a community of individuals. On the one hand this is without doubt life in extremis , on the other the narrative that emerges is neither pathetic nor demanding an empathic response from the viewer. The encounter with migrants and their lives among us requires a mode of engagement that tests to the limits the modes of representation we have at our disposal; neither description, nor analysis of the conditions of people’s lives , nor well intentioned empathy are equal to this task. In this work we can locate another model, neither analytical nor descriptive, it proposes that we might become partners in a mode of ‘address’. By ‘address’ I mean a reciprocal relation in which someone has something to say, has the voice and the narrative structure to convey it and assumes a listener who is an active participant in an exchange. In an address it is perhaps not the actual conditions being described which demand the interaction with the listener, as the ability to articulate and the conviction that such an articulation is one’s assurance of ‘being in the world’. Within an address we have to reflect on how we might listen rather than on what we are hearing and that begins the work of an equal exchange between protagonists and viewers.

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A discussion between filmmaker Alireza Rasoulinezhad and scriptwriter and film critic Shadmehr Rastin. Their discussion revolves around a recent film by Rasoulinezhad called Exteriors.
Exteriors – a one hour and twenty minute film shot on video – is a satire in three episodes about a disillusioned intellectual who disappears from Tehran to lead a different life elsewhere. He leaves his apartment to his nephew and niece, Shayan and Sharleen, with instructions and notes on various social and cultural topics and an unfinished film. Inspired by their uncle’s ideas and his film footage, they decide to make a film together; a decision that sets the ground for their (and our) encounter with the depths and facades of the social, cultural and political complexities of Tehran. What the film shows us is a kaleidoscope comprised of self-invented orientalism, performative traditionalism, intellectual turmoil, and a genuine strive for change. (Pages)

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1. Blood is a symbol of laceration. But where laceration practically takes place and the guts fall loose, just at the frightful and painful moment when the warm blood and the deadly burn of the deep and severe wound is felt, blood would no more be a symbol but an explicit sign that refers to laceration as an actual event. The laceration of one’s flesh, that makes the understanding of the self possible, is something without a cultural crust or shield. This kind of laceration and bleeding implies laceration of the cultural skin that makes the understanding of reality possible. Outside the symbolic system of cultural forms, we do not have any understanding of “the pure reality” or have any “direct contact” with it. But the lightning-like, fleeing moment of laceration and the climax of pain followed by the eyes closing tightly and the gnashing of teeth, always excite a primitive feelings. Severe pain refers to a time before culture. The continuation of severe physical pain is the continuation of primitiveness. The rest of the pains are cultural.

Thus, the craving for laceration, in the sense of craving for the laceration of the cultural mediations required to communicate with someone else, is a primitive and dreadful wish. A desire that cannot be fulfilled in the field of culture i.e., the surface, would be fulfilled by penetrating into the depth, i.e., by the sheding of blood, laceration and destruction – laceration of the body and the destruction of things, which are all manifestations of the symbolic forms of culture.

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An excerpt from a tape recording made during a tour through the exhibition “Iranian Modern Art Movement” guided by Sahar Samadian-Ahagar, an art guide at the Tehran Museum of contemporary art. (Recorded and edited by Pages)

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