Past Future Continuous

Pushed by her parents, determined to save her from the clutches of the cyclopean regime of Khomeini, Maryam was forced to flee Iran at the age of 20, hidden – like Odysseus – beneath a sheep’s fleece. She recalls this Persian retelling of an episode from The Odyssey from her home in the United States. Persona non grata in her home country, she has a video surveillance system installed inside and around her parents’ home with the help of friends who have remained there. On the other side of the world, Maryam watches them age, maintaining her filial love and connection to the past in the digital present. But when Iran cuts off the internet, the pixellated image becomes blurred, opening a breach in the narrator’s imagination where archives – both intimate and public – coexist with the sensory evocation of distance and heartbreak, and the hallucinatory dream of a house endowed with speech. With Past Future Continuous, Firouzeh Khosrovani (Radiograph of a Family, VDR 2021) and Mortza Ahmadvand create a powerful work which, at the border between poetry and reconstructed reality, evokes the indelible inner world that all exiles carry. 

Emmanuel Chicon