Project at ZK/U - Sanaz Sohrabi
Sanaz Sohrabi ( Iran )
During her stay at ZK/U, Sanaz Sohrabi worked on her doctoral research work, including a grant application, a conference presentation at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, did shooting for her current video essay in progress in Den Haag and Berlin.In her current research-based studio work, she seeks to render visible the marginal stories entangled within Iran’s quasi-colonial history of oil production with which much of its contemporary politics and collective memory have been shaped and imagined. In particular, she takes a close look at the ‘petro films’ of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, as fragments of an archive whose traces should not remain as legitimate history, but rather one should view them as a “recalcitrant event,” one that “reads the object against a fiction of access” (Anjali Arondekar; 2005). In this project, Sohrabi seeks to reconstruct the hitherto fixed evidentiary status of these archival materials and animate their visual ensemble and narrativize with and through them, so that they reveal their internal contradictions, gaps, and absences.