Shahnameh, or The Book of Kings, is assumed as a kind of portable museum and important ethno-identical/historical account of pre-Islamic Iran. My work consisted of ten printed folios from Shahnameh whose personage/figures were erased with the help of the digital editing software. Instead, all removed figures were displaced and printed on separate cards positioned on the wall in the gallery with no hierarchy. In this practice, I was hoping to propose both a space with heterotopian overtones where the ‘absence’ (of figures of the kings, soldiers, etc,) invites the viewers to rethink a new account of the past.
My objective was to deconstruct the historical narrative by leaving the space of actions (from the naratables) empty, idle and thus, contemplative. Consequently, the act of erasure brings an attention to the possible discourse of power and authority. In this project, I aimed to create a site of contestation where strategies about what represents a specific history and how to represent a past are to be questioned.
This project was on view at AT Gallery (June 2014), Poznan, Poland, as MA thesis exhibition.
2019 © Maryam Muliaee