Vali Mahlouji is a London-based independent curator and writer of Iranian descent. He founded the non-profit platform Archaeology of the Final Decade, which seeks to recover erased histories by researching and re-circulating artists, artworks and cultural narratives that have been obscured, censored, endangered or deliberately destroyed. He is director of the Kaveh Golestan Estate, a board member of the Bahman Mohassess Estate and an independent adviser to the British Museum. His curatorial projects include Recreating the Citadel and A Utopian Stage.

Born and raised in pre-revolution Iran, Mahlouji was conscripted into the army after leaving school but was exempted from military service because of a severed nerve in his right hand, sparing him the Iran-Iraq war. He later left Iran on a government-issued passport to study at SOAS in London.

In this interview, he speaks to The News on Sunday about growing up in Tehran, building a life in the UK and his commitment to uncovering overlooked histories through art and culture.

The News on Sunday: What are your recollections of growing up in Tehran?

Vali Mahlouji: While growing up in Iran, I was very aware of the attitude that taking an intellectual position against the state’s agenda was not only valid but almost required. As I moved through elementary and middle school, I became increasingly aware that the general consensus among intellectuals was that the state system was corrupt, politically repressive and oppressive. At the time of the Revolution, as a rather young person, what I remember is that, for me personally, there was a certain degree of excitement about the collapse of structures.

I went to the International School and came from a sheltered, economically stable background. After the Revolution, the streets were open and, as a teenager, that gave me a great sense of contact, imagination and excitement. Initially, the Revolution was a liberating moment. Very quickly it became a terrorising one because I knew many adults who had fallen into the grip of Islamic law and the prisons and were being executed. Friends, their parents – people were dispersing and disappearing. Trust collapsed quickly, with a great deal of blame, shame and mistrust taking over.

The terror affected me personally because, around the time I was in my teens, I had joined the School Pupils’ Arm of the Iranian Communist Party. Because of that, I was excited about breaking out of my bourgeois mould, learning about a different life and having aspirations beyond those that my schooling and family had allowed me. Quite quickly, however, it turned into a terrifying situation because all the leaders of the leftist organisations were imprisoned. Many were eventually executed.

TNS: What made you take up residence in London?

VM: I was aware of the choice of turning myself in to the Iranian authorities and responding to their announcement: if you have been a member of any of these organisations and admit it, we will pardon you; if you are arrested, we will deal with you as someone who has gone against the state and its security. That was the moment when I left the country and lost touch with all my “comrades,“ as they were called at the time. They were no longer my school friends because most of them came from bourgeois families and had left Iran. I was the only male from my original school who had stayed in Iran and found a new set of friends. Those contacts all dissolved and evaporated overnight because we didn’t use our real names or real addresses. In those precarious circumstances, we met only by arranging to encounter one another the following week at a particular street corner, and so on.

Most people lost the right to work, trade and travel. My immediate and extended family lost the right to work. They didn’t even have passports and arrived in the UK a decade after I had left. Because so many people my age were either on the warfront or in prison, I would have been considered one of the lucky ones. Being alone in the UK as an 18-year-old, with no work permit and no valid documentation except the Alien Registration Card booklet (you had to declare and record every move, every change in your academic course, even a change of flat, at the AR Office), I had no other identity.

At the same time, London gave me incredible liberty to experiment with many things, away from my family, away from Iran, away from the terror. Aesthetically and socially, it was completely embracing. Within the first 10 years, I had become quite a different person. I was aware of the excitement of what I had walked into: a metropolitan, thriving, multidimensional place.

TNS: What’s the background of your professional career as a curator?

VM: Following my degree at the SOAS, I had two choices: either to continue my academic studies in order to secure a visa, since I had no right to work or to become self-employed, which is what I did. I began an MPhil in old Iranian philology, studying Sanskrit and Old Persian. Ultimately I switched course and, with a partner, set up an archaeology gallery that operated as a trading post for four years. After that, I was granted permanent residency.

By then, I had developed other interests and enrolled on a master’s programme in psychoanalytic psychology. I went on to train at the Anna Freud Centre. Although admission required a bachelor’s degree in psychology, they agreed to let me complete the bachelor’s programme before entering the master’s. After that, I worked for the NHS as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the adolescent unit at Cassel Hospital.

Alongside that, I had always continued with my art projects in theatre and painting. Eventually, I drifted back to my art historical practice and, effectively, became an art curator. I continue to draw on both my archaeological and psychoanalytic interests in shaping my practice today. I think of it as a particular method of approaching art as an artefact.

TNS: Tell us about your experience of training as a psychoanalyst.

VM: The Anna Freud Centre was quite orthodox. At the time, it was known as the Hampstead Clinic, opposite Freud’s house. There was a kind of Oedipal/Electra chemistry. Anna Freud had herself been analysed by Freud. In that sense, she carried the mantle of her father. She had a slightly perverse desire to occupy her father’s seat after him. Anna took in children who had been separated from their parents during the war and adapted psychoanalytic concepts developed mainly by her father. The children came from various backgrounds, but Freud had the savvy ability to brand everything under his theoretical framework and practice.

By then, Melanie Klein, another major Freudian psychoanalyst in the UK, had started asserting her independence from the Freudian line, while Anna Freud defended her father’s ideas in a more orthodox way. Between the two, there was a split within the British psychoanalytic establishment – two German-speaking women, both from the Freudian tradition, but differing in how they applied it. Out of that split, something rather interesting emerged. By the late 1960s, the independent school had begun to grow, with figures such as Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Anna Freud went on to develop her own developmental stages because they enabled her to undertake empirical studies and demonstrate to funding bodies that her work could produce measurable change in people. It wasn’t just a good “idea;“ she wanted to prove something about attachment and object relations.

At Cassel Hospital, entire families from deeply disturbed backgrounds, involving severe sexual and physical abuse and neglect, were admitted. They lived there for a full year, funded by the National Health Service. It was an intense environment: everyone came off medication and there was no physical restraint. The approach drew on the thinking of RD Laing. Responsibility was placed back on the residents – we didn’t call them patients – and they were expected to manage as much as they could themselves. It was a fascinating programme of rehabilitation and therapeutic work, but it also became emotionally exhausting. I was offered a two-year contract, but decided instead to take time out. I began curating, writing and translating while working on theatre festivals, which eventually led to a project at the Barbican Theatre, where I brought together 10 Iranian video artists and three experimental Iranian theatre groups.

TNS: While looking at ‘art as artefact,’ what is your take on ‘the object as a fetish’?

VM: Fetishisation is central to my curatorial research, precisely because of my interest in the roots of things. In its broadest sense, I am interested in the entanglements, dismantling and expansion of an object’s experience and meaning. I am not the kind of curator who is interested only in the object; I am interested also in the source of the object. The form of curating that interests me, and which I teach, is the defetishisation of the object in order to release experience and knowledge. That’s where psychoanalytic theory comes in. If that process leads to rupture and displacement, that’s a good thing because the normalisation of things, or the creation of hierarchies that cannot be displaced, is not. Erasure, however, doesn’t come into it; rather, it’s the opposite.

For me, an exhibition isn’t just a place where objects are brought together. The best exhibitions become both a space of appearance and a space of experience; they should be genuinely experiential for the audience.

An exhibition should not limit itself to objects on walls with labels and attractive colours behind them. It should use the space to disrupt the otherwise easy relationship between an object, the space and the backdrop. It should be a space of inquiry and should complicate things in deeper intellectual, experiential and historical ways rather than reduce them. There mustn’t be a single truth or idea that you are proposing through an exhibition. Perhaps the best thing is to propose contradictory ideas. It has to be a bit like theatre, where I would prefer the audience to leave effectively altered.

TNS: Why is Kaveh Golestan a potent symbol of ‘democratic anarchism’?

VM: Kaveh was very important because he created artwork that was, at the same time, a form of social commentary linked to a specific historical and cultural moment. He did not produce work in an intellectual or socio-political vacuum. His father, along with various other artists, was already engaged with the vernacular, the street and the dispossessed. The political trajectories of thinking in Iran, particularly among the left and the Marxists, relied on tropes of the dispossessed and their plight as a means of political mobilisation and social critique. There were prisoners, women, labourers, prostitutes and dispossessed children.

There’s an incredible and visually stunning film called The House Is Black by Farogh Farrokhzad, which was produced in the studio of Kaveh’s father, Ebrahim Golestan, a decade before Kaveh commissioned the director Kamran Shirdel to make a documentary on the red-light district as a study of the plight of a segment of womanhood. It was censored and left unfinished because of the state’s ambivalence. Even so, there was a rich body of artistic and sociological material for Kaveh to draw on. He gained access to Qala-i-Shahr-i-Nau (the Citadel of Shahr-i-Nau) through a unit established there by a woman from the Tehran School of Social Work. Women’s organisations, women’s enfranchisement and the broader movement for women’s emancipation in Iran all helped shift attitudes towards prostitution and towards that space.

When I exhibited Kaveh’s photographs, I wanted to present history and place the images in context. That was a form of vertical archaeology: to dig down, excavate, preserve and place the object in the vitrine – in this case, Kaveh’s photographs. They had not been seen since 1978. It was a form of modern archaeology in which the object was placed in a vitrine and viewed. From there, however, I moved to what I call a horizontal archaeology, in the Foucauldian sense: unless those photographs are connected to other things, they cannot realise their full meaning. Thankfully, his widow was very supportive and encouraging. The photographs are no longer images that can be fetishised easily. It would have been very easy for Kaveh himself to fetishise these women. In my view, they constitute the strongest study of the female form produced in photography in the second half of the 20th Century.

TNS: In the context of the women’s movement in Iran, where would you place Forugh Farrokhzad?

VM: Forugh was a lone and unique shooting star whose life was very short: I believe she died at the age of 32. She attained a heroic status because she spoke openly about emotion; about being a woman; and about a kind of love that was not allegorical, that did not refer to some grand idea of love, but was, to some extent, carnal. As a woman, she was not widely embraced at first – she had to break through a deeply patriarchal system. In the very short time she had, she managed to overcome many barriers. On top of that, we have to acknowledge that both the words she wrote and the images she created were of an exceptionally high quality.

TNS: How do you respond to the attempts at exoticising Iran as a cultural backdrop by a slew of filmmakers?

VM: Pasolini made the film Arabian Nights, which was partly shot in Isfahan, Iran, at Ali Qapu and Masjid-i-Shah. I don’t remember any antagonism. I haven’t heard anything from the younger generation as well. However, I had reservations myself when I saw it in the UK in the 1980s. I was an underdeveloped intellectual and had a visceral reaction: Why did they do that in my country? As a more developed person today, I am pleased. I prefer to work through my own prejudices and the things that I consider sacred. It’s a difficult process, but things must have been very easy for Pasolini, who, as an artist, used magnificent backdrops. I can’t fault him for doing the recce and choosing those sites. Is he relating to them? No, he’s not.

That’s not the way I work. When I work with an object, a space or architecture, I do the opposite. I want to place it in context and expand it in different directions; I’m not going to use it purely aesthetically. The 1970s allowed for the kinds of excesses. In countries like Pakistan and Iran, we have a particular sensitivity, but I think such sensitivities do more damage than good. We have a long way to go in shedding those prejudices and our rigid ways of thinking if we are to find a middle ground.

TNS: That leads on to the question of ‘exploitation’ in art production.

VM: When Abbas Kiarostami films Iranian people in villages, to what extent do they know they are being filmed? Have they actually signed a release form? Do they get anything out of becoming the stars of his films? Exploitation isn’t about nudity, religion or exoticisation. Exploitation, in any form of art production, can simply be exposition. In that respect, Kiarostami’s work is quite exploitative.

Makhmalbaf’s film Salam Cinema, a great film, is really about his own sadism. The whole film is an ongoing series of castings. He puts up a sign saying, “Do you want to become an actor?” The film is based on the number of Iranians who turn up and are filmed while doing this or that. Most of Kiarostami’s films are works of genius. I observed him very closely. I was his right-hand man during his 10-day workshop in London. I was always his interpreter, from Persian to English and vice versa, whenever he made major appearances at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Film Institute.

He knew how to put himself on a pedestal. I also know how he encouraged people to be unethical and disregard obtaining releases, even when he was conducting his workshop in London. That caused a great deal of anxiety among the film students because they did not believe in filming people without their knowledge. But I have always admired his genius; his sensibility and sensitivity; and his attention to the minutest details of the human figure and its emotional life. From his early film Nan O Kucheh (The Bread and Alley) to Taste of Cherry, he is definitely an auteur.

I don’t want to single out Pasolini because I don’t want to exoticise either myself or him. I don’t want to create some kind of “clash of cultures” or an idea of “them versus us” because, I believe, we use and abuse ourselves quite enough, even though the post-colonial school tends to blame everything on the “other.“ I feel much more aligned with an existential or universal way of thinking about these things.

TNS: Where would you situate the Shiraz Festival of Arts – historically, politically and culturally?

VM: Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Jerzy Grotowski are the kind of theatre-makers who interest me. They were also the kind of people who were interested in the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts, the festival I have worked on for decades. I am more interested in the viscerality of performance – the epic, affective and cathartic possibilities that it can provide – than in text as a carrier of meaning.

My interest in the festival began through my work in theatre. I can either start by talking about the festival and my interest in it or talk about the platform I created to contain, fund and promote research on it. I realised that material on the festival was not readily available for me to gather and investigate. I remembered the contestations I had heard as a child: some intellectuals had boycotted it while others had attended. The material itself had been removed from circulation. That was my innocent starting point: to understand what Iranian theatre was engaging with and what those curating and directing performances were trying to bring into Iran.

By the time I had begun piecing the material together, I realised that almost everybody I interviewed had terrible things to say about the festival. I soon understood that I needed to speak to the artists themselves because, if I didn’t, I was only hearing negative reactions filtered through 40 years of hindsight.

When I began talking to the artists, they described the festival as emancipatory, revolutionary and educational. I started to place these two conflicting political and cultural positions alongside one another. I also realised there was confrontation even around my own excavation of the material. Out of those difficult experiences, I formulated my platform, Archaeology of the Final Decade. I undertook a kind of vertical excavation, finding material in people’s homes and basements, in secondhand bookshops or through a friend of a friend who might have a pamphlet. Little by little, it all came together, with most of the material coming from Iran and some from France and the US.

In 2014, I proposed it as an exhibition for the first time as part of a larger exhibition called Iran Unedited 1960-2014, which I co-curated with Catherine David from the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I soon realised that I had a very different perspective on why I wanted to stage an exhibition on Iran. I was also working on another project for that exhibition about Tehran’s red-light district, using Kaveh Golestan’s Prostitute series – the documentary photographs made between 1965 and 1967 – as the point of departure.

I was dealing with two art objects: the photographs and the ephemeral festival. One existed materially; the other did not. One carried an obvious social and political charge because of the question of prostitution, the urban landscape and open-air prostitution. I was called a monarchist for bringing back the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival, which was reductively dismissed as “a grand project by the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time” to present Iran as some kind of civilised place for the western gaze. On the other hand, I was labelled an Islamist because I was showing the darker side of the 1970s, where degradation and exploitation were difficult to confront.

The interviewer is an art critic based in Islamabad.