THU 29.9.2016

7pm – 9pm

Partisan Café
Bergen Gamle Brannstasjon
Rådstuplassen 9,
5014 Bergen (Entrance at Christies gate)

The London-based writer and curator Vali Mahlouji will give a lecture on his Archaeology of the Final Decade project, featured in freethought’s exhibition in Bergen. Following the talk, Irit Rogoff will discuss with Mahlouji how this project provides an infrastructure for memories, ideas, feelings, strategies and political forces that would otherwise be lost or destroyed.

Further information

Vali Mahlouji’s project ‘Archæology of the Final Decade’ is an ongoing research, curatorial and educational platform set up in 2010, which identifies, investigates and re-circulates significant cultural and artistic materials that have remained obscure, under-exposed, endangered, banned or in some instances destroyed. The retracing and reintegration of these materials into cultural memory and discourse, counteracts the damages of censorship and systemic erasures, and fills in gaps in history and art history.

One chapter of this project, ’Retracing the Utopian Stage: Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis’ is featured in Irit Rogoff’s ‘Archives of Substance’ section of freethought’s exhibition. For this talk, Mahlouiji will discuss a second chapter of the ‘Archæology of the Final Decade’ project called ‘Recreating the Citadel : Kevah Golestan, Prostitute 1975-77’. This examines Kaveh Golestan’s research and photography of lives of the women working in the Citadel of Shahr-e No in Tehran, only a few years before the district was torched by mobs in 1979.