Concept: Omid Mashhadi and Nazanin Bahrami
Performance: Nazanin Bahrami
Sound scape and Video: Omid Mashhadi
Painting: Nazanin Bahrami
Video Art: Mostafa Qahery
Sculpting: Nima Jahanbin
Frankfurt LAB, Frankfurt am mein
March 2024
A performance heightened by an accompanying soundscape and video installation.
Speech Lapse Exhibition Nr.3
The microphones are ready, the crowd is ready to hear, the lights are on, cameras poised, all attention is on you; the floor is yours, please proceed.
Through the interplay of dualities human and animal, primitive and civilized, historical and transhistorical, comprehension and incomprehension—speech Lapse exhibition Nr: 3 challenges the binary of the viewer and the viewed, witness and occurrence, leading to the question of who the true protagonists are, if any exist at all.
This opportunity to speak materialised here is both a critical confrontation with language and a quest to find a private language. This performed exhibition constructs its own material cosmos amidst and around the profound question of power and its ties to language, confronting the myths surrounding speech and its claim to communicativity. A project, and attempt, a process to dismantle the orderedness of language and its associated products, including narratives.
Speech Lapse emerged as an answer to the “Woman – Life – Freedom” uprising that began in Iran in September 2022. The project traces the written after-shocks of protest: diary fragments, encrypted chat logs, marginalia on receipts, time stamped voice-to-text transcripts. Each carries the grain of risk, offering resistance through the very act of documentation.
The piece attends to interruption how state censorship, fear, and urgency fracture speech and to the silent labour of repair carried by those who insist on writing anyway. By folding private testimony into a shared, constantly shifting archive, Speech Lapse tests how memory can move when official history locks its doors.
I have to create my diary, send them to someone, and then destroy them. It’s not safe to keep a diary.
We identify each other discreetly by asking a simple question like: 'What’s the weather like today?'
It’s the fifth of October.
What did you have for dinner? I had... soup? We know it’s safe for me to speak now.
Every time I go out I have my bag searched. Any evidence of protest could give the security forces another excuse to arrest me. Some of my friends who have been arrested have disappeared. I have to go, but please keep all of my messages and videos for me, will you? When freedom comes, I want to remember what hell we had to go through.
October ninth
What’s the weather like today?
The forecast mentioned clear skies, but you know how unpredictable it can be around here.
They shot me. I was just walking past a line of riot police. Some of them stared at me. I asked if there was anything wrong. Then suddenly, one of them pointed the gun at me and fired. Can you actually believe it? There is no logic. You feel like they are zombies. They grabbed my hair and pushed me to the ground. Every time I turned my head, I saw many guns pointing at me.
What did you have for dinner? The kitchen was closed by the time I got home.
Tonight for the first time ever I saw my mum confronting the authorities. She used to educate me to obey them, to abide by the rules imposed by the morality police. But now she's actually gone to challenge them. It’s mid-October.
October twenty first.
Hello. What's the weather like?
They say it's sunny, but I always carry an umbrella just in case.
There is so much happening, I’m drawing and writing what is happening but you know it’s not safe for me to keep a diary. Even my very conservative mother is changing because of these protests. She and her friends are horrified by seeing videos on social media of police killing young people on the streets. It is the first time she has ever openly criticised the regime. But still, I have to keep my protest a secret.
It's the 27th of October.
What did you have for dinner? just had some leftovers, Amazing how some dishes are better the next day.
The crackdown on the school protests continues. Children are outraged at the killing of a 16-year-old school girl. My niece is protesting in her high school and she told me how the militia and headmistress have searched them and threatened them. Now they are talking about an upcoming ‘massacre’ against protesters.
November first.
What's the weather like?
They say it’s typical weather for this time of year, nothing out of the ordinary.
I’ve seen such horrendous scenes. They shot a protester right in front of my eyes. I’ve been filming what I can. I want to make a documentary but I have to delete all my videos for now in case my phone is searched. Please keep the videos for me. Today I smuggled medical supplies into a safe house where they are treating wounded protesters. They can’t go to hospital. The police tried to search my bag, I screamed: 'Get out! I have my private stuff here!' It was night, so by torchlight I managed to show them my clothes and not the bandages and saline underneath. I got away, but it was so scary.
What did you have for dinner?
I'm trying out intermittent fasting.
After being shot, a woman told me: ‘I can see the dawn of freedom, so I will keep fighting in one way or another. November fourth.
What did you have for dinner?
What’s the weather like?
It was too dark to see the menu.
A half-moon with a slight chance of rain.
Hello? Hello? Please confirm if you got my messages. Hello? Hello?
Un-formula revisited the "Speech Lapse Exhibition Nr. 3" at
the Zukunft tanzt - Festival der jungen Choreografie 2024
Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm
