The Isle
May 27, 2009 - August 23, 2009

Pages (Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi)

The Isle is about the architectural and political incongruities of an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf called Kish. This presentation is the third and final part of a project by the artists, begun in 2005 with the installation Sunset Cinema and continued in 2007 with Undecided Utopia.

Throughout its modern period, the island of Kish did not fulfill all that was desired for it to be. Subjected to the politics of mainland Iran, the island finds itself lingering between opposing ideologies, caught in a geopolitical indecisiveness that prevent it from retaining a sense of “place”. Kish fails to situate itself historically and in relation to the geography that surrounds it. In many respects the island of Kish has become the "other" of its surrounding developments in the Persian Gulf.

Through videos, models, and re-appropriation of found documents, The Isle re-articulates the unresolved instances of Kish's modernization into representations of (unfulfilled) desires as symptoms of a modernity manifested in un-destined and ambivalent forms of architecture.