Listen to the audio version of this essay on Soundcloud. (Listening time: 11 minutes 21 seconds)
The films of Gelare Khoshgozaran hum with the unspeakable machinations of contemporary imperiality and the equally unmappable place-making attempts of the deracinated subjects that such violent, militarised systems necessarily engender. Tarrying with displacement as geopolitical phenomenon and aesthetic methodology, Khoshgozaran’s works, often shot with analog devices, extend the documentative act of filmic witnessing into affective, oneiric zones, unmooring overdetermining sensorial linkages between image, text, and sound in the process. Fundamental contradictions of imperialism are poetically unveiled in these works, as they materialise connections between, on the one hand, the xenophobic drive towards border control, and on the other, the extraterritorial violence and resulting stateless, disposable populations that are the primary condition and rationale for such control. One could, in turn, situate Khoshgozaran’s practice within the latest emergent field of experimental anti-colonial cinematic aesthetics – a transnational field broadly concerned with working out structures of feeling and consciousness that account for and struggle against ongoing regimes of coloniality and their always already fascistic underbellies.
Generative correspondences between formal and socio-political registers of displacement crystallise in one of Khoshgozaran’s earlier works, ‘Medina Wasl: Connecting Town’, 2018. The work, as if channelling the American cinematic romanticism of grand Westerns and road trip narratives, opens with the camera’s traversal of a vast, unpeopled desert landscape. Seemingly abandoned buildings, some with Arabic inscriptions, emerge from this flat, dry topography, guiding the viewer’s eyes through market stalls left unattended with apparent fresh produce, buildings – both modernist and vernacular – featuring unglazed windows, and narrow, ghostly alleyways. These textured observant images are paired with voiceovers of Americans – soldiers, we soon gather – describing their experiences during their military tours in the so-called Middle East – that geographical zone resignedly relegated, in the Western imagination, to perpetual violence without identifiable cause.
The soldier’s testimonials of their time spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, are however not so much focused on overt descriptions of militaristic confrontation, as one may expect, but rather on aspects of their sensory acclimatisation to their new environment – the colours of the land, trees, rivers and sky, the overwhelming humidity, the barking of dogs, the music in the bustling cities, the quotidian gestures of locals, the ubiquity of certain foods and drinks. But, also: the whiffs of aviation fuel, the stench of decomposing corpses under the desert sun, the whir of helicopter blades. Such focus on sensory impression is crucial in the way these elliptical accounts, taken together, narrate the atmospheric diffusion of US imperial violence and its material, phenomenological embeddedness in the lives of those who not only visit West Asia to fulfil the neo-colonial agendas of their domineering homelands but also the millions of barbarously rendered local civilians who are forced to endure the war’s aftermath and its transgenerational reverberations. Imperialism, we come to understand, is not an event but a process, a capital accumulative process productively configured and sustained through a set of life-unmaking aesthetic regimes.
Though the soldiers’ voiceovers appear to complement Khoshgozaran’s images, the work operates through a subtle but forceful displacive logic, as we learn that the 30-minute film was actually shot in a simulated military training venue in California. (Khoshgozaran, who has lived in exile in California since 2009, having emigrated from Iran, often remarks on the uncanny similarities between the two locations.) This fictional town, located in the Mojave Desert, thus collapses the migratory distance between the so-called West and the so-called East, materially embodying the hemispherical colonial dynamics Khoshgozaran seeks to interrogate. As a spatialised projection of the phantasmic Orient, the town enfolds interacting economic, cultural, and militaristic dimensions and durées of imperiality, functioning simultaneously as a commercial tourist hotspot (how the artist accessed the site), a theatrical set for the visual reification of the Arab Other (akin to the geographically proximate cultural apparatus of Hollywood), and of course, a concrete reproductive ground for the global maintenance of US military hegemony (which finds its equally racialised domestic correlate in the planned construction of Cop Cities throughout the US). [1] The film knowingly plays with the town’s implication in these violent aesthetic economies of fictive representation and artifice, forcing a formal disjuncture between the calm images of vacated landscapes and the richly descriptive narrations, as well as an indexical rupture between the site of oral testimony and its accompanying simulacral visualisation.
Similar techniques are employed to different ends in Khoshgozaran’s newest film, ‘The Retreat’, 2023. Here, the artist centres a group of friends who are currently living in exile in different countries and have experienced, first hand, the violence of borders and their enabling bureaucratic tools of surveillance and uniformization. As the work’s title suggests, the film was collaboratively produced with these friends while on a retreat with the artist in southern France. In this way, Khoshgozaran models conditions of artistic production that perform the film’s thematic focus on refuge and possibilities of transnational solidarity.
Akin to ‘Medina Wasl’, the film further engages in strategies of visual refusal, wholly absenting the artist’s collaborators’ faces and therefore mitigating the logics of transparency and reduction demanded by interrogative border control infrastructures. Instead, as the collaborator’s voiceovers sonically fill the cinematic frame – providing accounts of their migratory experiences through poetic, conversational, and performative means – we are lead through a succession of captivating images documenting moments of the retreat: the preparation of a group dinner, the surrounding verdant landscape, and the medieval architectural details of a hospital in Saint-Alban, which during World War II was run by radical Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles. Under the fascist Vichy occupation, Tosquelles devised an institutionally critical approach to psychiatric practice that established greater horizontality between carers and patients, involving patients as active participants in the running of the mental hospital. Tosquelles’ facility additionally served as a refuge for Jews undergoing Nazi persecution as well as members of the armed wing of the French Communist Party, Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, who militantly resisted the Vichy regime. [2] The hospital’s bi-functional identity as both a mental and quasi-political asylum during the mid-twentieth century lends rich historical context to the film’s contemporary explorations of the unrepresentable impact of refuge-seeking on the exiled psyche.
‘The Retreat’ keys viewers into a core tendency in Khoshgozaran’s practice, which is its persistent invocation of transnationally entangled traditions of radical anti-colonial, anti-imperial and anti-fascist thought. In one scene, a signpost in the hospital’s environs briefly appears bearing the name “Fanon”. Indeed, during the 1940s, the Martinican psychiatrist, political philosopher, and anti-colonial activist Frantz Fanon trained at the Saint-Alban facility under Tosquelles and would thereafter go on to develop one of the most influential theories on the psychological effects of colonialism.
Khoshgozaran’s short essay-films, ‘MEN OF MY DREAMS’, 2020, and ‘To Keep the Mountain at Bay’, 2023, further elaborate radical intellectual genealogies by introducing historical, internationalist constellations of thinkers, poets and activists that allow the artist, and us as response-able viewers, to navigate and make sense of the estranged present. In the former work, various spectres – including literary theorist Edward Said, poet Federico Garcia Lorca, filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, and even the artist’s father – are conjured in a surrealist fashion, their facial profiles appearing as photographic cut-out masks that are superimposed on the protagonist’s face. The latter work serves almost as a feminist counterpart to the former, with audio excerpts that bring together poets Etel Adnan and June Jordan into conversation with artist Emilia Yang. Through impressionistic images, loose editing, and ambient sound scores, both these works ambiguate the delineations between reasoning and dreaming, prose and poetry, the past and the future. If indeed, as Khoshgozaran states in the opening scenes of ‘MEN OF MY DREAMS’ “The gradients of fascism are diverse in their predictable dullness”, perhaps what their practice offers – against the rising tide of imperialist monstrosities, from Haiti and Palestine to the Congo and Ukraine – is a poetics of solidarity, a cinematic shelter for the mediation and distribution of alternative anti-colonial visions that have and continue to threaten the unimaginative modern world order.
[1] See T.J. Demos, “Counterinsurgent: Cop City, Abolition Ecology, and the Aesthetics of Counterreform,”e-flux Journal, Issue #143, March 2024.
[2] Ben Platts-Mills, “Asylum”, Aeon, 2021: https://aeon.co/essays/patients-and-psychiatrists-fought-against-fascism-together-at-saint-alban
KJ Abudu is a curator and critic based between New York, London, and Lagos. Informed by anti/post/de-colonial theory, queer theory, African philosophy, and Black radical thought, his writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and intellectual practices from the Global South responding to the world-historical conditions produced by colonial capitalist modernity. Abudu recently curated Traces of Ecstasy at the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, February 2024. Other exhibitions include Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management, Artists Space and e-flux Screening Room, New York, 2023; and Living with Ghosts, Pace Gallery, London, 2022, and the Wallach Art Gallery, New York, 2022. Abudu is the editor of Living with Ghosts: A Reader, Pace Publishing, 2022. His writings have appeared in e-flux, Frieze, Mousse, Tate Etc., and numerous other publications and exhibition catalogues. Abudu is part of the curatorial team at the Swiss Institute (SI), New York, overseeing its public programs and residencies.
