SACRED DEFENSE
Sacred Defense is a story of producing artificial war images, from raw materials used in their making to their social reception. It not only traces the existing modes of construction of fake war narrations and images. It mainly creates new war-related simulacra in digitally amended satellite images of Iranian nuclear installations.
Sacred Defense is a tantalizing game, in which alluring images make us believe we see the war. We are looking at illusions, however. We follow how the war simulacra of social and political importance are being constructed within different spaces and narrations. A cinema city, constructed only for the purpose of shooting war movies, is a self-referencing space, created not to be experienced itself, but to become an image of war. Museums mimic the wartime reality in the smallest detail; with wax figures of fallen martyrs allowing to meet dead heroes again; and plastic replicas of antipersonnel mines sold as souvenirs. A nation is curing its trauma by enhancing its own image - by beating the world record in the number of aesthetic nose surgery; yet this means wearing new bandages.
From a play between the real and the unreal, a copy and the original, the author leads us to the point where he creates his own, new simulation. He amends satellite images of the Iranian nuclear installations with mutually exclusive versions of destruction, which may be caused by the US/Israeli strike. Buildings destroyed in some images stand intact in others, and all parallel versions of the same event are presented on a single satellite map.
On the one hand, we have alternative versions of destruction, but at the same time we see a multiplication of the same strike, a repetition required, to use Milan Kundera”s view, to create real meaning in historical events. Yet in his self-referencing simulations, the author does not use past events as a basis, but instead is plotting alternatives of an event that never happened despite being widely discussed in the media.
Sacred Defense is embedded in the post-war reality of the Iraq-Iran war (1980 - 1988), an internationally forgotten conflict which cost nearly a million lives and caused a deep national trauma with consequences comparable to the impact of the Second World War on Western societies. In the Iranian historiography, this war is called the Sacred Defense War; a very particular concoction of religion and war.