Borders are an imaginary line

Borders are an imaginary line
Audiovisual Installation 00:18:11
2022-2023
Borders Are an Imaginary Line is part of an ongoing collaboration between MeshkatTalebi and Olivier Terpstra that combines prose, moving image, soundscapes and music to create an immersive audio-visual installation. Their process is gradual, it grows like a conversation and starts with a recording of Talebi reading a piece of her writing, perhaps accompanied by some moving image suggesting a time or a place. Terpstra responds with a soundscape, a gesture or an effect. The conversation grows, call and response, refine and revise. They create a space to share their dialogue and offer the personal as political in a bid to explore complex and often divisive issues with a deep personal impact.

By utilizing diverse archives, the intention was to explore how the body carries the history of women's resistance and its interconnectedness across generations.

Installation contained four hanging screens made by fabric. These videos comprised a blend of my personal video archives, internet data from various protest timelines—some of which I experienced firsthand—and recordings I made during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran
while in diaspora. Each screens were presenting different videos, linked subjectively with each other.

Sound played a pivotal role in crafting a space that oscillates between presence and absence. The surrounding sound, served as a conduit to evoke history in detached from its roots.

The use of both my mother tongue and English echoes a profound sense of navigating between two distinct realms, each characterized by its own life rhythms and cultural landscapes. This duality reflects the sense of in-betweenness experienced through language confusion, symbolizing my existence in two distinct mental and physical states simultaneously.

This project involved a live performance during the exhibition time in which Talebi and Terpstra challenge themselves to enact their working process live, sharing their dialogue of personal narrative, embodied language, shared sonic spaces and gestures in a bid to activate language, body and memory together with the audience.