Gelare Khoshgozaran: To Be the Author of One’s Own Travels

Delfina Foundation is proud to present the first European solo exhibition by its former resident, LA-based Iranian artist, writer, and filmmaker Gelare Khoshgozaran, guest curated by Eliel Jones. 

Born in Tehran in 1986, Khoshgozaran produces work that engages with the legacies of imperial violence. Through film and video Khoshgozaran explores narratives of belonging outside of the geographies and temporalities that both unsettle a sense of home, and make places of affinity uninhabitable. 

To Be the Author of One’s Own Travels brings together three films by Khoshgozaran—two of which are new commissions—that continue the artist’s deep reflections on the effects of displacement. Through the invoking of various social and political imaginaries, both past and present, Khoshgozaran’s exhibition seeks to speak to the personal impact of exile and its generative potential as a space to build transnational solidarity. 

Shown for the first time in the UK, To Keep the Mountain at Bay (2023) is a short film shot on Super 8, which explores the figure of the mountain as a witness to experiences of displacement and exile. Conceived as an ode to Etel Adnan and her relationship to California, the film weaves together fragmented images and words that speak against the passivity of nostalgia and assimilationist propaganda. 

In close proximity to this work, Khoshgozaran’s new hand-edit of the 1939 animation Gulliver’s Travels will be projected on loop through a prism, producing a visual distortion of images in the space. The exhibition draws its title from the original Jonathan Swift novel, a piece of literature fuelled by the gallivanting tales of 18th century upper-class English men—an imaginary that is stark in its contrast with the ongoing crisis of movement of vulnerable populations of the Global South who face the closed borders of Europe and North America. 

Delving into the temporal, spatial and relational effects that these contemporary migratory movements have on the body and mind of the exiled, the third film presented will be an ambitious visual expansion of Khoshgozaran’s 2022 essay, The Too Many and No Homes of Exile. Central to this newly commissioned work is an “exile retreat” organised by Khoshgozaran in rural France with participants recruited from an international open call for individuals who are barred from returning due to border partitions, war, occupation, colonial settlements, fear of political persecution or other circumstances. 

Khoshgozaran’s discursive and participatory approach towards developing this new moving image commission is guided by a desire to create space for the convening of persons in exile across borders, languages, and histories. In the process, the artist seeks to create an adjacency to similar gatherings sparked by civil and global wars of the early 20th century—in particular, the convenings made possible by the radical hospitality of the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles. 

It was at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, in Lozère, where Tosquelles worked for over 20 years, that numerous international artists, writers, and thinkers escaped political persecution, whether through engaging in psychoanalytic training, or through taking informal long-term shelter in the space. All in one way or another became involved with his vision for a type of “anti-concentrationist” environment, which integrated patients with the local community, involved them in meaningful work, and sparked their engagement and participation in various types of cultural production. 

At a time of on-going urgent calls for the fulfilment of a politics of abolition of prisons and migrant detention centres, of occupations and expanded forms of carcerality, Khoshgozaran’s exhibition will create a space to contemplate alienation, world-building, and the role of fantasy to cross boundaries and enclosures both literal and figurative. 

Credits
The exhibition has been made possible thanks to support from: The Andy Warhol Foundation Lightning Fund via LACE – Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Elephant Trust; Delfina Foundation’s Network of Patrons for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia; and the Gelare Khoshgozaran Exhibition Circle.

Forthcoming exhibition 
Farah Al Qasimi, October 4–November 12, 2023 

About Delfina Foundation
Based in the heart of London, Delfina Foundation is an independent, non-profit foundation dedicated to facilitating artistic exchange and developing creative practice through residencies, partnerships and public programming.