ADMA 2025-2026

An Archive of Rage

On the politics of image, refusal, stopping, and stopping twice

I came to this research from a distance. As part of the generation after the Iran–Iraq war, my first association with war was shaped through the state narrative I was raised in. Then, during the twelve-day Iran–Israel war of June 2025, I encountered an ongoing war for the first time, though still from the diasporic distance of living abroad. That distance drew me increasingly into an overwhelming amount of digital material, above all the media images circulating about Iran and Southwest Asia. During the internet blackouts, when contact with people inside became limited or impossible and access to real-time information shut down, these images and narrations became the only channel through which I could follow the news as it shifted from moment to moment.

My research investigates how the occupied regime of image and language produced by state and institutional media around concepts such as war, resistance, homeland, and solidarity, shapes our ethical positioning and collective memory.

Power here does not operate through images alone; it claims ownership over the language of resistance itself. From an early age, these events reached me through educational materials, slogans, and ritualised language that framed resistance and martyrdom as moral imperatives aligned with state ideology. Vocabularies such as martyrdom, sacrifice, and motherland, circulated as ideological slogans, documentaries, songs, and monumental calligraphic displays in public space, are mobilised to stabilise meaning and occupy the narrative.

The recurrence of wars in the region, the growing polarisation of media discourse, a Euro-American-centric gaze on war, and the ongoing neutralisation of the violence of these events together produced a sense of ethical dissonance: a pressure to take sides while recognising that every available position is already ideologically contaminated. This tension between inherited belief systems, personal refusal, and ethical uncertainty opened a space in my practice to ask how an image matters, what an image does (instead of what it means), how we see violence, and how we might navigate the rage that moves through these dominant visual experiences.

As the research developed, I stopped trying to produce clarity, counter-images, or a corrected account, and began instead to work through refusal. Rage, in this research, is a method of refusing the demand to resolve, and to let the meaning settle. To stop. And then to stop again.

These questions place the work in conversation with Harun Farocki's operational images, with Ariella Azoulay's potential history, and with João Fiadeiro's Real Time Composition, the methodology of stopping which gave me a way to think refusal as a compositional act.

my inner drive for working on this matter was coming from a state of resistance and strength, a will for reclaiming agency. At this moment, I feel like I have lost that strength. The resistance has been replaced with rage, the hope has been replaced with rage, and even the subject of my focus has been replaced with my rage.

To ground this, I worked with two bodies of material: Ravāyat-e Fatḥ (The Chronicles of Victory), Morteza Avini's documentary series on the Iran–Iraq war; and social media imagery from the twelve-day war, which I archived myself as the events unfolded. Separated by decades, these materials echo the same distortion of feeling in wartime, connected by how images are weaponised to stabilise meaning around violence, resistance, and belonging.

The outcome of this first stage of the research is a publication: an archival Image-book accompanied by research-diary texts, presented in an installation set-up. It brings together the work of navigating rage, the war on narration, and the dis-associations that this process set in motion.