Overview

Ximena Cuevas introduces Paradox of Time: Studies in Memory (2012) by Bani Khoshnoudi:

‘Maybe cinema comes in through our eyes and ears. Maybe also through our intellect. The films that remain engraved in my soul are those that enter through my guts. Those are images and sounds I can´t ever escape from, the ones that haunt me forever through which a whole world is created in my mind.
That is the case of Paradox of Time: Studies in Memory by Bani Khoshnoudi. It is a nightmarish hypnotic dance that evokes a sense of terror and confusion to normalise the imposition of horror on reality. It mirrors a reality in Mexico. It is a work that moves every inch of my body and soul. The music is painful, like in a dream it endlessly moves on and yet it keeps us trapped at the same point throughout. Paradox of Time: Studies in Memory is a work of resistance in these days of cold post-humans. It shatters me emotionally.

About the work:

Working with archival images from a key historic moment—the Iranian Revolution—the image-based study explores notions of duration (cinematic and historical), memory (virtual and image-based), and their sensory and emotional (affective) impact as historical and potentially ‘revolutionary’ subjects.
Repetition is explored as a principle of memory, as an aesthetic device, a space to inscribe meaning. Repetition is also explored as historical mimesis, as an eternal return, and as a possibility for reinvention. Finally, repetition is a means to question the role of agency in human nature.
This image-based study is a work in progress and is carried out incrementally, whenever the need arises to examine, excavate and repeat the memory.

This film has been screened as part of A Collective Memory: Poetics, Politics & Love Letters, a lecture-performance by Azin Feizabadi for the Delfina Foundation’s ‘Public Domain’ program and the ICA London Artists' Film Club (2014); and Global Revolutions, Local Contradictions, Mind Pirates, Berlin (2012).

Screening

Paradox of Time: Studies in Memory (2012)
Bani Khoshnoudi
Iran, Mexico
Experimental | 22 minutes
No dialogue

This screening is part of the Genealogies in the Middle East and Latin America project, which explores historical and contemporary relationships between artists from these two regions. It unfolds along narratives revealed by the artists' personal accounts that provide critical alternative perspectives and insights by decentralising dominant narratives, schools and paradigms produced and affirmed in the West.