Interview in the context of Exhibition Seep at Chisenhale, London, UK.

Katie Guggenheim: I wanted to start by asking you about your collaboration, under the name Pages. You have been working together since 2004 to produce the magazine Pages, of which there have been eight issues so far, with the ninth issue due later this year. I’d like to know about the relationship between the magazine and the other projects you work on together, your exhibition at Chisenhale included. How did you start working together? Did you begin with the magazine?

Nasrin Tabatabai: Our collaboration started in 2004, as you said, and at that time, we had this idea of starting a bilingual Farsi/ English magazine. During this time, there was also an invitation from Witte de With art center, so we published the first issue Public and Private there. At the same time we thought to present some of the artistic materials that we gathered while working on the magazine into an exhibition. There were films and photographs around the same topic and we also worked with a young theatre group in Iran and made some videos of their performances.

KG: So it started simultaneously? You started publishing Pages at the same time as you had your first collaborative exhibition?

NT: Well, that exhibition was more an extension of the magazine– an extension of our editorial approach into an art space. The works there were not directly our own work –From there it felt necessary to bring our ideas to other formats and other ways of presentation, but some kind of relationship always existed. Sometimes our ideas first come together as an exhibition and then this would develop into an issue of the magazine or maybe topics from the magazine develop further into the exhibition.

KG: Does the magazine function almost a sketchbook? You’re sharing your research process through the magazine?

NT: I wouldn’t look at it as a sketch book, the magazine is a work on its own. A lot of time the subjects that occupy our minds and our interests as artists living outside Iran relate to the current discussions among different cultural practitioners living inside Iran. Working with the magazine has brought us more awareness in both ways affected our own practice as artists living outside Iran.

KG: Is the magazine a way for you to keep in touch with colleagues: artists, academics etc. in Iran, because you’re working internationally?

BA: In a way it is. For every new issue we produce the material in Iran as much as we produce it here where we work, where we are based, in Rotterdam. We also stay for a period of time in Iran to do research and to develop material together with our contributors. When you stay there for a period of time you get engaged in some discussions, and that also determines, to some extent, the content, direction and editorial approach of each issue. This is also about keeping the magazine up to date in terms of discussions that are going on in Iran, and in the same way keeping the connection with the context in which we are working, which is a European one.

KG: Your exhibition at Chisenhale, Seep, has developed from your research into two archives which document two different relationships between Iran and a kind of European, Western Modernism: the BP archive relating to the company’s operations in Iran when it was known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and the collection of Modern Art belonging to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The interest for you seems to hinge on the fact that both the archives have been suspended or discontinued or removed somehow. What interests you about this suspension, as a shared characteristic of both archives?

BA: Maybe it’s more about the temporal and historical stage in which each archive is redefined. If we focus on the archival documents related to the making of the film, Persian Story, as the oil company’s final production, somehow it is because they depict and rearticulate a much more intense, focused and meaningful relationship with the context in which the film was produced and with the whole idea of that archive itself. It’s the same with the collection: the moment in which it was withdrawn into the basement storage area of the museum – that is the moment when it gained a relationship with the socio-political context. This opens up a consideration of the whole notion of collection and collecting and archiving in general, but also within that specific historical context, which is in this case the Iranian context. Maybe you can talk about this with other archives or collections: that there is a certain moment in the existence of an archive where it becomes intensified in its relationships.

KG: So it’s like a rupture in the historical continuum of the archive: a point where something goes wrong and that’s when it connects…

BA: I don’t think it’s a matter of right or wrong, it’s more a moment of intensity, when something is revealed through a relationship with its context. In the case of the modern Western Art; before the 1979 revolution it was not so much about situating this collection within the Iranian historical and cultural context, but actually the opposite: taking the museum beyond its immediate context. Then, when the collection was withdrawn, is was – for the first time you could say – recontextualised within its more immediate conditions and surroundings and thereby became ‘Iranian’ – if such a thing exists.

KG: So the decrease in its visibility led to an increase in its presence?

BA: Yes, in a way. Such a modern collection was a means of associating the museum and the Iranian cultural climate with the West and with a certain idea of the contemporary. We would argue that when it was withdrawn – when the collection became invisible – that was when it became contemporary, or when it regained a certain idea of contemporaneity within the Iranian context.

KG: And in the case of the suspension of the other archive, the BP archive?

BA: Towards the last years of the archive, from the early 1940s until 1951 when the company had to evacuate Iran, you could say that it became an archive a staged archive. In the beginning it was purely documenting the company’s activities but towards the end, more and more often it was documenting staged and fictitious situations. If you read the correspondence – the letters and the telegrams that were sent around the making of the film mentioned earlier – you can sense the last attempts in the establishment of that fictitious narrative of the archive. But then it became impossible to make the film because of the political dispute around oil and the closure of the refinery. The filmmaker actually faced lots of difficulties; one of the terms he used is ‘unfilmability’; so we took this notion of unfilmability as a moment where the archive as a whole is being redefined in relationship to its geopolitical context.

KG: In both cases there is negation of the visual – the collection is no longer on display, and the subject of the BP film is unfilmable.

NT: Of course, we are not suggesting that the collection has never been shown after the revolution – it has been shown sporadicaly – not as systematic as a museum display their collection in the West. The collection has been on view in some occasions since 2003, but still – it doesn’t change the subject, you know? The collection even if it is displayed , it remains somehow invisible as it is not recontextualised. Similarly, the film, Persian Story, was finaly made, but it was made in a different way than was initially intended.

In the installation we are also presenting the List in Progress detailing the contents of the Western collection, as far as we could put it together. What was interesting for us is that this list starts with the measurements of the work rather than with the title or the name of the artist. By starting from the idea of the measurements, we wanted to focus on the volume and the space that these works occupy, rather than their art historical relation

The list accompanies a scale model which depicts the museum, but only the corridors and ramp. We focussed only on this visceral skeleton of the museum – only the lead through passages and excluded representational areas where exhibitions are supposed to take place.

KG: I’m particularly interested in the way that you have combined all these different approaches – the model, which is at once representational and very abstract, the documents, in the form of the lists and letters, the archival objects, which also function as props, and how you refer to all these very different things as one installation with the collective title, Seep.

BA: Yes, in terms of genre we are showing works that reference different styles or aesthetics or strategies, but, the choice was actually about how the whole installation also functions as an exhibition; it is also a comment on the exhibition as a format of display. When you walk into the space you are confronted with an exhibition: you have videos, you have objects, you have prints – different materials, each referencing a genre from art history – but, for instance, in the first video that is based around the BP archive, you see a fictional depiction enacted within a theatrical set. The voice, which reads the letter from the filmmaker, sets out the discrepancy between the visual materials of the archive and the real situation in which he was shooting. What is unfilmable here is the archive…

We have taken some of the objects from the film set, reappropriated and displayed so they become more like sculptures. You can say that, on the one hand, they reference the genre of sculpture, which is the genre through which they are placed within art history. On the other hand, another way in which they are associated with history is through the fictional space of the film set about the BP archive.

NT: Although the intention was just to go and make a film, in fact the filmmaker always stayed within the enclosure of the archive. That was the idea we wanted to present in our video: it’s as if while he’s going through these images in the archive, he is writing the script of his film.

KG: Why did you take such a different approach to the subject matter of the second video, which you have described as a kind of ‘road movie’ and almost has the feeling of a home movie?

NT: That video is of our trip to South West Iran. We deliberately do not give any particular information to avoid making it into a documentary. It looks at the areas where the actual archive took place. At one point we arrive at a natural oil seepage, which has existed for many years… it really affected us to see how this oil would seep into the river in this area, in this landscape. It somehow goes beyond the historical description that any archive can to put forward, or any system or reading of history. This influenced how we brought the whole project together, and also provided the title of the project: Seep.

BA: We revisit the site of the archive 6o years after its production. in which is the geographical site of a historical misplacement. We felt that the oil seep gave a way out of this historical rupture that existed between the place and the archive, or the absence of the archive. Again this is something that the director of the Persian Story film had felt: the disassociation between the archive and the location

NT: It was interesting to see that the oil has its own agency and it has been there for many, many years, even before the archives.

KG: Maybe one of the things that makes it so striking is that it’s unindustrial – we’re not used to seeing oil outside of the context of its industrial extraction and industrial usage and the enormous impact this has on the world. In your video you show it exuding from the ground in a natural way.

NT: And where the oil floats on the surface of the water there are fish swimming underneath!

KG: Could you talk a bit about the new prints that you’ve made by applying paper directly to the surface of water where oil is floating? They weren’t in the first presentation of the installation at MACBA but they have clearly developed from this work.

NT: In our most recent trip to Iran, earlier this year, we went again to South West Iran and again to the same area where we shot the footage of the oil seeps in the video. We made some direct imprints of the oil seeps on the river.

BA: They are a direct print of the oil flow over the water, but they also capture a moment, of that flow and in that way they begin to talk about archiving and again the idea of withdrawal, which is an inherent aspect of any archive.

KG: The installation, Seep, was first shown at MACBA in Barcelona but it seems quite significant to show the work here because of the connections with the UK via BP: the Anglo-Iranian oil company and the British Petroleum company. What are your hopes for how this work will engage with this context and with a UK audience?

BA: We are very curious to see how people will respond to this work, because it’s a shared history. For instance, when the Anglo Persian Oil Company first came into existence it was a time when there was a shift from coal to oil in the British navy. Oil in general has had an enormous impact on the modernisation of Europe in general. The work is not only talking about the Iranian context, in fact most of the archives we are working with are Western archives, but considered from a different point of view, geographically and also historically. I think it will be interesting to see how it is received and read in the UK.

KG: Where will you take this body of research next?

NT: At the moment we are working on the next issue of our magazine, Pages, which will be titled Seep. Some of the materials from the BP archive and the museum will be entering the magazine, but we also have other kinds of contributions, which are not directly related to these. We hope that we can do a few days of research at the BP archives whilst we are in London.

BA: The idea is for the magazine to be a kind of continuation of where we are at the moment with the installation. Neither the BP archive nor the collection will define the editorial basis of the magazine, instead, like the installation, the central element or the thing that implicitly binds everything together will be the oil seep. The magazine will consider ‘seep’ as an idea of archiving or an archival practice. Something that we would like to do for this issue is to let the magazine have a more material presence, in terms of design and printing… in this sense it connects to the new works we are showing at Chisenhale – these imprints of oil.

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