Mishandled Archive

it is a process that opens up new possibilities of using history, not as a backdrop to our lives but as a material to be played with, distorted and appropriated. Fatehi Irani has created a method of extending our archival stories that lives outside of institutions, history books and photo albums. It is a method for artists but also for archivists of the everyday and historians of the imaginary. If everyone has a story, and those stories are threads, Fatehi Irani’s work is like a loom, crossing and knotting these threads together through encounters of past and present. By mishandling the archive we are making our own marks on it, but also letting it mark us.

Tara Fatehi Irani’s 'Mishandled Archive' publication folds time and space in complex ways, creating a strange weave of collected images, near and distant lives, real and imagined pasts, instagram posts and minimalist dance scores. In its detailed, endlessly reflexive record of a year long performance it speaks of diasporic experience, displacement and new modes of what might be called belonging. It’s a compelling project that celebrates the fragility, tenaciousness and fecundity of memory and the extraordinary capacity of images to summon narratives as they interact with landscape, casting a spell of connection between strangers in locations around the world, from London to Tehran, Newcastle to Zurich.

In this gem of a book, Tara Fatehi Irani expands even further her vast creative exploration of how remembered histories link to global networks of bodies, spaces, and temporalities. Deploying a range of media from the oldest known to human communities (oral history and gossip) to the newest (social media), passing through archival research and modes of documentation, Fatehi Irani's nomadic performative process creates new worlds. This book both informs and dazzles for any interested in history, memory, archives, and performance.

Tara Fatehi Irani leaves us with such feelings wherever she goes and whatever she does … in a playfully structured daily praxis of juxtaposition of realities, she has been building a web to trap the attention of an occasional passerby … someone open, who would get in touch, curious to hear the story … A story related to the lost and misplaced fragments of lives of unknown people … Many were intrigued across diverse geographies. Me, I can’t stop thinking of that pair of knees from someone being cut out of the picture … and of the photo of two women in elegant white mid-knee length dresses, whose heads have been cut off the picture, photo left at the Montpelier Pub.… Warm recommendation.