An Incomplete Calendar

Der 14. Juli 1958, der Sturz der Monarchie im Irak, gilt in der westlichen Geschichtsschreibung als Putsch. In der arabischen Welt hingegen gilt er als Revolution, als Zeichen des Aufbruchs eines ölreichen Landes, das nicht allein war: 1960 wurde die OPEC gegründet, die Organisation der erdölexportierenden Länder. Sohrabi – geboren in Teheran, in Montréal arbeitend – rekonstruiert in AN INCOMPLETE CALENDAR mit hochinteressantem Material (unter anderem Schallplatten und Briefmarken) einen Moment, in dem der globale Süden eine Chance hatte, der Geschichte eine andere Richtung zu geben. Ihr fulminanter Essay erweist sich als Schlüssel für unsere komplizierte Gegenwart. (Bert Rebhandl)

What an astonishing compendium! The genealogy and evolution of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries; a Venezuelan choir conducted by Teresa Jaén performing folk songs from the OPEC nations in their respective languages around the world during the 1970s; a theory of translation based on the premise of a common zone of language that allows one language to pass into another; a hypothesis about memory being captured in the sound of films; an admirably laborious exercise in microhistory which examines stamps, letters, publications and photographs from the period in question. All of this creates a gloss of a period in history when transnational solidarity existed and another notion of modernity for the countries of the Third World was glimpsed, one that was not a mimesis of European modernity. Can something like this be filmed? Sanaz Sohrabi’s exemplary essay shows the way: the heterogeneous materials are integrated into the always surprising mise-en-scène, which restores a historical era that illuminates areas of the present and interprets the past as a sediment of utopian memories at the service of a political imaginary aimed at emancipation. (Roger Koza)

Sanaz Sohrabi: LOOPHOLES (2014, K), DISPOSABLES (2015, K), AUXILIARY MIRRORS (2016, K), THE GLORY, THE HUMAN, AND THE MOTHER: A CARTOGRAPHY (2017, K), SCRIPT FOR GROUNDLESS IMAGES (2018, K), NOTES ON SEEING DOUBLE (2018, K), ONE IMAGE, TWO ACTS (2020), SCENES OF EXTRACTION (2023)