History and Memory Revisiting (2014)

Project Description:

History and Memory Revisiting engages with Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), an important ethno-historical illustrated textbook, known as a symbolic "portable museum" of pre-Islamic Iran. This artworks in the exhibition reimagine the visual narrative of Shahnameh by erasing its central figures—kings, soldiers, and other personages—from ten printed folios using digital editing software. These erased figures were displaced and printed on separate white cards, presented without hierarchy on a gallery wall.

The intentional removal of the figures leaves the original spaces of action empty and idle, transforming them into contemplative voids. This act of erasure disrupts the fixed historical narrative, inviting viewers to rethink and reconstruct the past on their own terms. By creating a space with heterotopian overtones—one that reflects both absence and possibility—the project foregrounds questions of power, authority, and representation within historical storytelling.

Through this process, History and Memory Revisiting becomes a site of contestation, challenging strategies of what is included, excluded, and valued in visual representations of history. It invites viewers to reconsider how the past is constructed and whose voices are centered or erased in dominant narratives.

This project was exhibited as part of the artist's MA thesis at AT Gallery, Poznań, Poland, in June 2014.