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By Nazanin Zarepour
15 March 2024

SPECTRAL FUTURES is an exhibition at Trinity Square Video running from February 22 to March 30, 2023. Curated by Vince Rozario, this exhibition brings together the digital media practices of Jawa El Khash and Shirin Fahimi, which confront the absence of queer, feminist and otherwise marginalized narratives within dominant histories.

What do we seek when we look toward the past? In the face of capital-induced displacement, the trope of “Uprooted Artist” has emerged as an effective depoliticizing bind – trapping our glances at history in a perpetual state of grief and longing. The Uprooted Artist is born, in part, out of a desire for a miracle – that one can somehow synthesize the contradictions between present lives and ones “left behind.” The resulting cultural production often traps itself in the stillness of memory, waxing narratives that cannot account for transformation, dynamic shifts, changes in absence. This urge to self-ethnographize would not be possible, however, without an external push. The Uprooted Artist is expected to “perform the function of native informant”, to represent, and therefore, calcify trauma and history for the colonial viewer.¹  Caught in the trappings of back-home platitudes and self-deluded authenticity fables, how might we relocate liberation and dynamism in the telling of our histories?

Liberation ideologies of 20th century West Asia in the age of decolonization offer an alternative. From the traditions of Arab existentialism to the liberation theologies of the Iranian Revolution, intellectuals made an urgent call for a re-imagination of the “Self” in relation to the colonial “Other.”² Iranian intellectual Ali Shari’ati, for instance, articulated the self through an invitation to take a fresh glance at our history.³ In articulating history, one must not be concerned with “accurate” representations of the past, nor seek a pure native past outside of empire. This is not to propose the manufacturing of facts but rather that a neutral view of history in itself is a fantasy. One must instead look to the past with the intention of locating new meaning and avenues of emancipation for our present and future – to refashion our idioms for political action.

In negating “authentic” re-telling, Spectral Futures provokes a fresh glance and re-articulation of our past, and thus offering a disruption to our present. In the latest iteration of colonial-preservation efforts, VR and new media technologies have become critical in attempts to produce so-called “accurate representations” of real-world counterparts.⁴ The immersive, and in turn, depoliticizing function of these technologies manufacture landscapes where one can step into mystic pasts separated from present, lived reality. Jawa El Khash and Shirin Fahimi challenge the hegemonic implications of new imaging technologies to invite fresh glances at our histories that remain inextricably linked to both present and future materiality. In continuous confrontation with sand, earth, the rough edges of the technology being used, the fallibility of rendered images, Spectral Futures urges us to keep our feet on the ground. Thus, the re-animation of ancestral memories of displacement and colonization do not invite disembodied grief, but are a beckoning call to ground our struggles in the present and in the land. In

Upper Side of the Sky, El Khash takes up the question of preservation by re-imagining Palmyra, Syria—a landscape that has been especially subject to centuries-long colonial obsession. Collaged within a thick mist lie the ruins of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph, the Roman Theatre, and the Temple of Bel, all of which were subject to Daesh’s destruction in 2015. This devastating act of iconoclasm was met with outrage from the West, born out of what can only be deemed a sense of “first dibs” on the pillaging of so-called global heritage. It was through the archaeological fascination with Palmyra during the French Mandate (1923-1946) that residents of the city were permanently displaced so that the land be excavated and looted, and its objects “dispersed to museums around the world.”⁵ Coins featuring the portrait of Palmyrene queen Zenobia are scattered throughout the simulation, gesturing at centuries of plunder that have shaped the ancient city.

As the threat of “becoming a tool of the ruling classes” looms over the past, Walter Benjamin urges that “in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”⁶ With Palmyra’s history in mind, El Khash locates within the ancient city a capacity to disrupt this chain of ethnographic retelling. This process necessitates a confrontation with the legacy of empire – its destruction, its severing of our ability to witness our relationship to the places where we once laid our heads. Yet this is far from an invitation for dislocated, disembodied grief. Rather, Upper Side of the Sky breathes movement and life into the image of Palmyra through its surreal utterances of butterflies and plant life – exaggerating their size, movement, relationships to one another. The image of the butterfly extends into dimensional space by way of a hologram with its visible wireframe, calling to mind technological fallibility and relocating our contemplations of empire back into the material world.

The texture of sand at the base of our feet draws us again to the tactility of history, echoed by Fahimi’s Umm al Raml’s Sand Narratives. Searching for the lost figure of woman prophets, Fahimi entrusts the land to guide us in our radical re-imagination of the past’s punctured fabric. Drawing from the tradition of 7th century Islamic geomancy where sand is used as a surface to cast sixteen marks as a basis for divination, Fahimi asks: Where are the woman prophets? Relegated to the margins of history, these woman prophets are not accessible through an archive. Rather, it is the sand, its prophecy, and the oral histories and spiritual practices of four Iranian women in Toronto that guide this quest. It is through their storytelling that we may “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (emphasis mine).⁷

As one of Fahimi’s spiritual interlocutors notes, the female prophet cannot be found “through information” – it is the sand that holds this history: “I grab one fistful of this sand and let it pour from my fingers and I say ‘the female prophets are here.’” The sand, as a receptacle of history, fluidity and change – offers a critical line of flight. Fahimi’s sand is an epistemology. In its challenge to colonial historiography and linear narrativization, it proposes an alternative modernity, and a potential for post-secular futures beyond the hegemony of rationalism. The sand is also a political guidemap. By holding prophecy, land becomes the very cradle of potential and future.

When Ali Shari’ati spoke about “fresh glances,” he urged the importance of itjihad (independent interpretation) as a method to resist the trappings of religious or political institutions. He determined the validity of his interpretations of Shia traditions based on one factor: “If you see my interpretation (...) of the principle of the Imamate has a positive effect on my life as an individual and on the society that believes in it, then it is correct.” In other words, the essential reframing of history is that which propels one forward toward radical change.⁸ What is our intention in searching for the absent universes in the maimed fabric of history? What is our interpretation? In response to this question, the Uprooted Artist archetype has simply given us the framework of grief. In taking a “fresh glance,” however, Spectral Futures presents a view of history firmly rooted in the material.

Spectral Futures is on display at Trinity Square Video until March. 30, 2024. 

NOTES 1. Kavita Singh, “The Future of the Museum is Ethnographic” (lecture, ‘The Future of Ethnographic Museums’ conference, Oxford, UK, July 21, 2013).
2. Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent (New York: Routledge, 2017).; Yoav DiCapua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

3. Kingshuk Chatterjee, ‘Ali Shari’ati and the Shaping of Political Islam in Iran (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
4. Ella Mudie, “Palmyra and the Radical Other: On the Politics of Monument Destruction in Syria” in Otherness: Essays and Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (2018).
5. Ibid.

6. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Lloyd Spencer.
7. Ibid; Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 83-109.
8. Chatterjee here is quoting Shari’ati’s Intezar – mazhab-e-itiraz. Chatterjee, ‘Ali Shariati,’ 142.