Musée d’art de Joliette

Anahita Norouzi. Rift is a dual exhibition project that questions the notion of “progress” as an instrument of colonial domination through the history of oil exploitation in Iran. Although Norouzi's project stems from the targeted examination of a particular geopolitical and historical context, it contributes to a broader reflection on its current context, as the intersecting problem of appropriating and abusively extracting the planet's resources generate global upheaval, jeopardize populations, and disrupt humanity's future. In her most recent film and installation work, Norouzi adopts a counter-prospective approach to examine how oil and cultural infrastructures have been jointly used to control both bodies and minds.

At the Musée d'art de Joliette, her first exhibition Un hameçon enfoncé dans la peau, revolves around a two-channel video that weaves together images from the films Persian Story (1951) and The Deer (1974), produced by British Petroleum. Under the title False Arrivals, Norouzi associates the Abadan Crisis that led to the expulsion of British oil companies from the city of Abadan, with the tragedy of the Rex Cinema fire, which occurred during a screening of The Deer. What emerges is the tension between imperial promise and revolutionary unrest. The film is accompanied by a new installation titled Incomplete Burning, an assemblage of clay bricks and red-tinted glass bricks that were cast from impressions taken from the charred walls of the Rex Cinema. Positioned in the gallery like ruins one must walk through, these masses carry the imprint of combustion and decomposition, and act as material witnesses to buried history.

Galerie de l'UQAM will present Avaler le soleil, featuring the premiere of Norouzi's eponymous film that explores the colonial modernization of south-western Iran by British Petroleum. In the face of ecological ruin and dispossession, it imagines the region as a place of spectral and mythological possibilities. An adjoining sculptural installation questions the notions of circulation and spillage and evokes the metaphor of an entire infrastructure built on capital, oil pipelines, petroleum, the sweat of laborers, cracked and contaminated mining sites, ecological collapse, and leakage. The installation takes shape within the infrastructure of the gallery itself: its ventilation system, in the exchange of inside and outside air, in the condensation and recovery of accumulating “sweat,” and in the slow corrosion that results from cracks and leaks. For Norouzi, “the air that is conditioned and channelled through conduits in the gallery is part of an imperial debris: an operating system that perpetuates imperial modes of control (confinement, circulation, interior stabilisation) rather than a post-imperial condition.”

Curators : Ariane De Blois et Louise Déry