2018
Film essay and installation
In collaboration with Benji Boyadgian
The Owl, the Queen, and the Modeler brings four clocks made between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Iran and Palestine into a comparative film essay. The clocks are approached not as neutral instruments, but as public objects through which technological modernisation, political authority and competing accounts of history became visible.
Archival research, memoirs and urban stories connect the clocks to Tehran and Jerusalem. Rather than claiming that the two cities share the same history, the work places their different experiences of imperial intervention, national formation and local adaptation in dialogue. The clocks provide precise material points from which these uneven histories can be examined.
Fictional passages enter where the archive becomes incomplete or contradictory. These passages are kept recognisable as artistic constructions. They do not resolve the gaps in the historical record. Instead, they make it possible to test how memory, rumour and historical evidence shape one another, and how a clock can acquire political meaning far beyond its practical function.
The collaboration developed through dialogue between the artists’ different relationships to Tehran and Jerusalem. Its comparative structure holds the two locations together without collapsing them into a single geopolitical condition.
Presented in The Owl, CrossSections, WUK, Vienna, 2018.
