This «subtractive commemoration» of the 1953 U.S.-orchestrated coup d’état in Iran utilizes false testimony as a medium to explore the nature of historical memory. Ousted Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, played by Nasser Rahmaninejad, alternately delivers three inconsistent accounts of the coup drawn directly from the language of the Shah’s memoirs, the CIA planning documents for the coup, and a celebrated leftist’s harangue against U.S. imperialism. Not a single word of Mossadegh’s is deployed. Woven together as a single testimonial given by the wandering protagonist, the texts decisively fail to add up. In light of today’s historical revisionism, the failure begins to reflect on the uses of testimony and documentation to obscure not only the factual record but also, more radically, the inescapably fictive dimension of all historical memory.

biografia

Peter Freund is usually working on something else. He writes to avoid making art and makes art to avoid writing. He is a sometimes curator so as to avoid his own work, but usually that inspires him to write or make art. He is co-founder of the Barcelona-based artist collective, Adversorecto, which uses “retraction” as a working method for producing individual and collaborative works. www.peterfreund.art

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