We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We are the history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.*

* Senior Advisor to former US president, as quoted in NY Times.

Sacred Defence is a story of producing artificial war images and reconstructing historical events to create a group memory. It not only traces the existing modes of construction of fake war narrations. It also creates a new, war-related simulacra in digitally amended satellite images of nuclear installations.

Sacred Defence is a game, in which images make us believe we see the war. We are looking at illusions, however. We follow how the war simulacra of social and political importance are being created within different spaces and narrations. A cinema city, constructed only for the purpose of shooting war movies, is a self-referencing space, created not to be experienced itself, but to become an image of war. Museums mimic the wartime reality in the smallest detail; with wax figures of particular martyrs allow to meet fallen heroes again; and plastic replicas of antipersonnel mines sold as souvenirs.

From a play between the copy and the original, author leads us to the point where he creates new simulation. He amends satellite images of Iranian nuclear installations with mutually exclusive versions of destruction, which may be caused by a hypothetical Western strike. Buildings destroyed in some images stand intact in others, and all parallel versions of the same event are presented on a single satellite map.

On the one hand, we have alternative versions of destruction, but at the same time we see a multiplication of the same strike, a repetition required, to use Milan Kundera’s view, to create real meaning in historical events. Yet in his self-referencing simulations, the author does not use past events as a basis, but instead is plotting alternatives and producing 'proofs' of an event that never happened despite being widely discussed in the media.

[Sacred Defense is embedded mainly in the post-war reality of the Iraq-Iran war (1980– 1988), an internationally forgotten conflict which cost nearly a million lives and caused a deep national trauma with consequences comparable to the impact of the Second World War on Western societies. In the Iranian historiography, this war is called the Sacred Defense War; a very particular concoction of religion and war.]

Exhibition in Mieszkanie Gepperta Gallery, Wroclaw, during TIFF festival 2014.

Exhibition in Mieszkanie Gepperta Gallery, Wroclaw, during TIFF festival 2014.

Exhibition in Mieszkanie Gepperta Gallery, Wroclaw, during TIFF festival 2014.

Exhibition in Mieszkanie Gepperta Gallery, Wroclaw, during TIFF festival 2014.

DEMERGER is a story of the race for land and space in the north of Sudan. It is a story about how archeologists compete with the government, foreign companies, farmers and gold seekers; how the appropriation of varying philosophies and narrations leads to the appropriation of the space itself.

The disintegration of Sudan into two separate countries was forced by China and the USA and results in far-reaching consequences for the whole Horn of Africa. Northern Sudan, after the loss of a large portion of revenues from oil in the borderland with what is now the South Sudan, is desperately looking for new sources of income. The scheme includes the construction of a series of dams on the Nile to acquire hydroelectricity. As a result, water reservoirs start to occupy agricultural land, the only fertile belt along the Nile. This makes it necessary to resettle people living along the riverbanks and to find new sources of income for them.

But not only farmers and the Sudanese government (backed by foreign construction companies) are taking part in the race for the land. Gold seekers and archaeologists join in. Economic turmoil after the state demerger and the increase in gold prices attract people from all over Sudan, who transform the desert into hundreds of open-pit mines. Archaeologists are coming to take part in the rescue action to unearth and save traces of past civilizations before the water covers them forever. They are attracted by the partage, a system non-existent outside of Sudan, which allows them to take a part of excavated artifacts to the home museums.

Despite their co-existence within the same space, all of the contenders for Sudanese land refer to different values and construct different narrations to underscore the importance of their actions. Although they share the same subjective treatment of space, they reveal diverging approaches to the land and its resources. They experience the same space, but live in differing times. Archaeologists self-identify and achieve the self-assurance needed to maintain their work through the narration of the rescue and protection of the past. This is based on the Western philosophy, where material traces of the past are important for the preservation of the cultural continuity and tradition. Their everyday life is the past day of Sudan. People from places in which research is carried out, in turn, are strongly anchored in the present; they aim to maintain the status quo, and above all to stop the inevitable changes caused by the dam construction. They are not interested in the past and the remnants of older civilizations among which they live. Their protests to stop constructions are bloodily suppressed. In contrast, the government, construction companies and gold seekers are focused on the future time, which they hope will bring returns from their current investments.