Every Four Years

About the performance

Every Four Years begins with a journey that never happened. In the summer of 2009, Zoya was preparing to travel to Iran for the first time as an adult and reunite with their grandparents, hoping to deepen their sense of cultural belonging. At the same time, a fraudulent presidential election sent protesters into the streets, and footage of the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan circulated around the world on YouTube.

Moving through personal narrative, family history and diasporic memory, Every Four Years layers archival media, multilingual text, performance for camera and a score of embodied movement. The work holds spectacular violence alongside personal loss, tracing how political images position those who witness them, how cultures of fear organize gesture and relation, and how the antagonism between the governments of Iran and the United States becomes entangled within diasporic identity and memory. Refusing narratives that place ideology at the center of human relation, the performance turns toward the body as a site where political images can be questioned and remade. By reconfiguring images of martyrdom, it interrupts the spectacular language of nationhood through which suffering is made to produce fixed ideas of belonging and national identity.

Part performance lecture, part collective inquiry, Every Four Years opens into a participatory score of movement, writing and dialogue. Audience members are invited to become collaborators, examining their own physical vocabularies of fear and composing movements that counter its hold. Moving from watching to doing, they rehearse an ethics of nonviolence: a way of encountering one another beyond the narratives nations ask us to perform.

This project was first commissioned by Mare Culturale Urban in Milan, Italy. One of the video artworks in Every Four Yearswas screened in the group exhibition, Parallel Screens, curated by Brunno Silva at 1805 Gallery. The video artwork commemorated the ten year anniversary of the Green Movement in Iran.