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Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (PAGES)
Founded in 2004 in Rotterdam, Tthe Netherlands

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What kind of collections and archives do the  Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts and British Petroleum have? 

Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (PAGES) (NT & BA): Our focus with Tehran MOCA is primarily on its collection of Western modern art, which was purchased during the two years prior to the museum’s inauguration in 1978. It is perhaps still the largest collection of Western art outside the West, with works by Renoir, Rodin, Picabia, Picasso, Vasarely, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Pollock, and Judd, among others. The building of the collection and the museum can be seen as the high point in the Shah’s long-term cultural modernization project, which ended with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The Western collection was then kept in storage for 20 years, and even after that it was only partially exhibited. Interestingly enough, the artistic practices reflected in the museum’s collection from the 1960s and 1970s were already starting to be questioned at the time of its inauguration. Thus it was also the end of an era in art. The British Petroleum archive that we are working with goes back to the first half of the 20th century. It is about the early history of oil in the Middle East, which began in southwest Iran with the establishment of the British oil company called the AngloPersian Oil Company. Housed in Britain, the archive holds various documents, photographs, and films related to the development of the company up through the year 1951, when it had to give up its possessions to the Iranian government after the nationalization of oil (which was soon followed by the 1953 coup d’état, engineered by the British and the U.S. CIA, restoring the company as British Petroleum). The archive depicts the early searches for oil starting in 1902 to the building of Abadan as a model for a new kind of industrial city in the Middle East. The archive shows the introduction of modernity into Iranian industry, architecture, and culture; in very peculiar ways it links Western and Middle Eastern histories of modernization and industrialization.

AP: What connections have you detected between the two archives?

NT & BA: Different political and economic connections. The circumstances of one spill into the other. The question for us is what story these two archives can tell about modernity in Iran—a modernity that remains both historically and politically unresolved. Even though the MOCA collection and the BP archive draw a linear progression in art and industry starting from the early 20th century, neither really offers a seamless history of modernity in Iran. They are troubled archives, embodying moments of discontinuity and interruption. Still, a narrative of modernity is imaginable from these very discontinuities. The collection of modern art (a stranger in a foreign land) became contemporary when it was withdrawn into the museum’s cellar, and so it reentered history, albeit through a back door. The question is how artistic practice can relate to the history of modernity through this same back door?