Statement:

Five years ago, in June 2018, this venue which used to host Electric Room, presented “Tehran UFO Project”, a half-satirical take on the September 19, 1976 Tehran UFO incident. At the time, the display was meant to dig up a historical event and review it, while hinting at the sense of alienation the steadily-dosing-up exposure to news has been increasingly inducing.

Now, five years later, digging up four consecutive issues of Ettela’at Newspaper —September 19 through 22, 1976— and displaying clippings from them, revisits both the event, the news coverage, the literature of the time, and the exhibition at Electric Room.///

Through the past five years, witnessing so many previously-unfathomable events and adding them to our already-inconceivable reserve, reality and the future have taken a more horrific landscape: the feeling of disbelief, as well as the sense of alienation, have grown out of proportions of the almost-flexible framework of our minds.

To bring what is presented into view, I had to go back to five years ago when this space was more vibrant and enjoyed the company of many visitors each week. In doing so, I tried to revisit experiences and conversations I had with people at Electric Room, jumping over everything in between.

The triple-jump made everything in between skewed and distorted, especially when the mechanisms of recall took over. You see, recall, as powerful as a tool it is, slyly practices its powers over one’s thoughts, analytic capacity, anticipation and deductive processes. With so many malignant threads planted into one’s memory, it is impossible to recall without causing devastation.

The wicked and the extreme imposed their tentacles —to practice true escapism, I had to sneak into a literary world, whose unbearable made-up realities would be made comfortable once I remembered to employ the suspension of disbelief on merely my own reality and not theirs.

But the more I visited the venue or thought about the days past, the more I was left with the image of an idea left desolate. I rushed to combine non-fiction with fairy tale, journalism with parody, reason with the uncanny, the mundane with the out-of-place, in a hasty effort to furnish the white withered space and ornament it with precious memories of its once-visitors.

Everything unreasonably went well but in the after-hours, Cinderella’s coach became a cage, itself confined within an unfitting space, unexpected winds blew dust into the room, tainting its immaculately-white walls, and everything shaken by the long jump had in fact had enough time to catch up and remind me of the horror of realizing that I am still in the present, that there is nothing more horrific than this impossibly-real truth. The squash, naturally jaded and now devoid of its pumpkin disguise, seated itself within its own creation, and the fairy godmother intervened to hastily gown-up for her donor/curator role, tearing into the mesh matrix of ‘the image’, laying a billboard bare only to find traces of a lost campaign. Fiction ripped into curatorial integrity, consistency of vision, coherence of discourse and continuity of thought.

Welcome to an apparition of an idea, hosted again in this electric control room: a circuitry that conducts a business in places apart, working from a walled distance from its subjects and practicing its influence unconcerned.

To come to this place again, I have had to remember, relive and reimagine: I have missed the conversations, the critiques, the cornering, the constant chaos and the countering control. I have tried to welcome you by gathering my thoughts, summoning up friends, assembling a set of theatrical impossibilities, and conjuring up ghosts into an abandoned place. It could be present, while it lasts.

The current display, Surrenders to an Unimaginable Rhythm, marks the beginning of INSIDE, despite, an experimental art and exhibitions program conceived by Ashkan Zahraei that is scheduled to be hosted at the former venue of Electric Room.

“Surrenders to an Unimaginable Rhythm” could not be made possible without the generous help and trust of Ahmad Avani (Cinderella’s Coach), Mahoor Zahraee & Alireza Mohammadi (Untitled 7, from Subconscious series, 2012), and Taba Fajrak (The Fairy Godmother, 2023).///

I would like to extend my thanks to Pooya Aryanpour, Omid Zargham, Nazanin Avani, Shahrzad Jahan, Aydin Zia Moghaddam, Mahrokh Mollasaeedi, Siamak Mokhtari, Pooya Hashemi, and last but not least, Babak Afshari.