Joint lecture with Aria Farajnezhad and Azadeh Sarjoughian
24.7.2026 | 7 PM
In How to Abolish a Name, Aria Farajnezhad turns to one of Iran’s early national bank buildings, built in 1928, to ask how modernisation made antiquity speak as the image of a modern nation. The work traces how pre-Islamic origin, Aryanism, Persian Orientalism and nationalist desire were built into architecture, language and naming, while Islamic, Arab and non-Persian histories were cast as obstacles to progress. To abolish the name Aria, then, is not to erase it, but to interrupt the fantasy of purity it carries, to loosen the body, the building and the city from a fantasmatic genealogy that made exclusion appear natural.
Taking the video essay as its point of departure, the lecture explores the temporality of return and asks what it means to return to a past that has already been selected, purified and made to authorise the image of a nation and a future already imagined in advance. When does return reactivate historical memory, and when does it repeat the fantasy of origin?
In 2017, the building was refunctioned as the National Bank Museum. The bank becomes a museum not as a break, but as the completion of its own logic: capital accumulated as value, antiquity accumulated as evidence, heritage accumulated as origin. The building stores money and time in the same gesture, turning national memory into another form of reserve. In How to Abolish a Name, this reserve can no longer remain stable. What has been accumulated to secure the fantasy of coherence begins to turn inward, producing the conditions of its own implosion.
The lecture will be followed by a screening of Aria Farajnezhad’s video essay How to Abolish a Name (2025)
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Workshop: On the Notion of Return
2 – 4 PM
Earlier in the day, a workshop will offer a more intimate setting for reading excerpts from Fanny Söderbäck’s ‘Revolutionary Time: Revolt as Temporal Return’ and Harry Harootunian’s ‘The Future of Fascism’. Through these texts, and through shared architectural examples, the workshop will consider how return unfolds across time, politics and space, touching on revolt, accumulation, uneven development, nationalism and the persistence of unresolved histories.
The workshop is limited to 12 participants and requires registration.
Send your request to: aria.farajnejad@gmail.com
Aria Farajnezhad
Aria Farajnezhad (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, sound, ceramics, installation, and essayistic writing. His research-based practice examines the political and historical dimensions of infrastructure, public space, and representation. In his project series Beyond Undoing a Rediscovery, he engages with the colonial imagery of the Brinkmann mural at Bremen Central Station and its persistence in public space situating it in dialogue with diverse local contexts and interconnected causes. He studied at the University of the Arts Bremen, where he completed the Meisterschüler program in 2022. From 2020 to 2022, he co-ran the artist-run space Circa 106 in Bremen. He is currently a Villa Minimo fellow at Kunstverein Hannover.
Azadeh Sarjoughian
Azadeh Sarjoughian (b.1979) is a curator and researcher whose work engages contemporary art practices, decolonising art histories, feminist art historiography and the politics of exhibition-making, with a focus on Iran, the wider SWANA region and their diasporas. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Birmingham and is co-editor of the Third Text special issue Polyphony: Voice, Method, Archive (2024). She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Brighton, where her project Curating Unrest: Political Graphics from Street to Gallery examines the ethical challenges of researching, archiving and re-presenting graphic expressions of dissent from Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom uprising.
8 – 11 PM
Bar Night/Gathering
The Summer Bar is a project by kunst- und kulturverein spedition / Die Summer Bar ist ein Projekt von kunst- und kulturverein spedition e.V.
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