Gelare Khoshgozaran Finds a Politics of ‘Home’ After Exile

Describing themselves as an undisciplinary artist and writer, Khoshgozaran's practice is both anchored to their personal experience and untethered to it, with works articulating the stretching of time and space that shapes displacement as an embodied experience of simultaneity.

As Khoshgozaran wrote in 'The Too Many and No Homes of Exile', a 2022 essay commissioned by Beirut-based non-profit Ashkal Alwan, 'You're here but you're somewhere else'—a condition mapped out in Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (2018).

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Presented at Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. biennial in 2018, the film pairs footage of model Middle Eastern and West Asian towns constructed in the Californian desert as military training grounds, with audio testimonies by U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

Site, memory, and geopolitics collapse in Medina Wasl, recalling the artist's 2021 video Memories of Loitering, where images of Khoshgozaran visiting Tehran using Google Maps are accompanied by a script drawing from their grandmother's fading memories of home.

Two works produced for the artist's first solo exhibition in the U.K. at London's Delfina Foundation, To Be the Author of One's Own Travels (23 June–6 August 2023), expand on Khoshgozaran's exploration into the roving textures of lived and psychological space.

The title comes from a line in Irish writer Jonathan Swift's 18th-century novel, Gulliver's Travels (1726), which Khoshgozaran has interpreted through a re-cut of a 1939 animation of the book, resulting in the 16-millimetre looped film projection To Be the Author of One's Own Travels (2023).

Khoshgozaran's edit amplifies the uneasy tone of a book that effectively justified colonialism by introducing a benign protagonist, who, in the end, retains a privileged patriarchal role. Reversing the narrative, the artist ends their cut with Gulliver drowning in the ocean as to mirror a kind of toxic alienation, whereby Gulliver is lost to the system that shaped him.

This study of alienation is mirrored in a second commission, The Retreat (2023), a film produced as part of a project the artist embarked on for this exhibition. Khoshgozaran assembled a group of exiles for online and offline meetings that centred on the work of François Tosquelles, a radical psychiatrist who worked at Saint-Alban hospital in France, where Frantz Fanon also trained.

Like two sides of an oscillation, both new films are mediated by the 2023 video To Keep the Mountain at Bay, on view in London, which the artist considers a companion piece to Men of My Dreams (2020). The film, commissioned by Cell Project Space in London, pays homage to writers, singers, journalists, and poets like Roberto Bolaño, Federico García Lorca, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Khosrow Golsorkhi.

In To Keep the Mountain at Bay, excerpts of poetry and prose by Etel Adnan, June Jordan, and Nimā Yushij, as well as media artist and fellow exile Emilia Yang, are read over images of California and the Caucasus Mountains which straddle Asia and Europe—'an attempt', the artist writes, 'to map exile as a space of collectivity and transnational solidarity'.

This search for transnational solidarity defines Khoshgozaran's study of displacement and the artist's attempts at finding ways through it. In the following discussion, Khoshgozaran expands on this search, with a focus on their exhibition, To Be the Author of One's Own Travels.

SBThe title of your Delfina Foundation show, To Be the Author of One's Own Travels, draws on Gulliver's Travels, which you also made a work about. Could you talk about that?

GKI had this curiosity about Gulliver's Travels after I came across a Tate catalogue on Mona Hatoum. Edward Said wrote this essay where he interprets Hatoum's world through Swift's book, and the constant alienation of going into the world and coming back feeling more alienated from the human race.

I became very curious to read the novel, as I also grew up with a cartoon adaptation of Gulliver's Travels. Multiple versions of it had been dubbed in Farsi and there were even buzzwords that came out of it, which my generation in Iran was very familiar with.

It was interesting to read the novel and remember the animations about the cutesy adventurer who goes out into these wonderlands and reports back. The novel has nothing to do with parts of the story that I experienced in the animation. The Lilliputians, the story retold the most often, is one chapter of many.

It was difficult to read, too. This is 18th-century England, and as much as this guy is trying to be self-reflective, it's a commentary on how to be a good colonial—of having a respectful rapport with the powers in the places that you visit.

But in the end, it gets misogynistic. Gulliver is mean to his wife and family, who have held down the fort for him to go out and explore. He's like this melancholic man who comes back alienated, primarily from his family, but also from the human race. He's realising that all the worlds out there are a lot more valuable and interesting.

I had been looking for a way to speak about my experience of exile without shying away from doing so because of outside pressures. Especially in art, where you are expected to perform or represent a region or experience.

So that's where the title of the show came from. In the introduction to Gulliver's Travels, there is a letter from Captain Gulliver to his cousin Sympson, in which he complains about how the printing and publishing industry and other writers have distorted his accounts and do not allow him 'to be the author of [his] own travels'.

That sentence resonated with the sense of agency and authorship that I was looking for. It also spoke to faith and incredulity. I had been looking for a way to speak about my experience of exile without shying away from doing so because of outside pressures. Especially in art, where you are expected to perform or represent a region or experience. And if you do so, they tend to reduce you to just that.

At the time, I read a lot in preparation for another work I was developing, about the history of institutional psychotherapy and the legacy of François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist who was the doctor at Saint-Alban hospital in France, which directly relates to mental health in relation to exile and being a refugee.

I also became curious about narrative therapy. A friend who is trained in drama therapy introduced me to counselling methods, where you work with the patient to understand and tell their life's narrative outside the trauma, which relates to a question I had: how to write one's narrative, own it, and develop your voice with agency and separately from the boxes you've been put into and the expectations you're dodging as an artist.

Dealing with these heavy subjects in an abstract way, I found it necessary to get my hands busy with the material. I bought a Super-8 version of the Gulliver's Travels animated movie and thought about how to re-narrativise the story in a way that went against Hollywood's telling, where Gulliver makes peace between two families so two lovers can come together, and so on.

I wanted to create an alienating telling by showing parts of the body that are isolated or dissected, so I reversed the film's order: the beginning becomes the end, and Gulliver goes into the ocean and drowns. For me, this is expanded cinema because I'm thinking in terms of frames and how important montage is in meaning-making. I edited it on Super 8, projected it, and shot it on 16-millimetre film to be projected on a loop. In the exhibition, the loop is about two-and-a-half minutes long, while the original cut is about an hour.

SBThis idea of Gulliver as a coloniser alienated from home because of their leaving it inverts a work like To Keep the Mountain at Bay, which explores the expansion of one's world through the condition of displacement. Could you speak about this?

GKTo Keep the Mountain at Bay was an attempt to think about exile through fragments of poetry or responses that I would get from people that I considered part of my community, through writing or voice recordings.

The piece only tangentially is to do with exile. It thinks about California and the experience of living there for 14 years without going back to Iran, and what that distance means. More and more, I've been imagining home as a lineage, or legacy, that you see yourself as part of. I don't mean that in a heavy-handed, intellectual or artistic way, but in terms of the people who came before you, who created pathways to move forward.

Literature has done this for me for as long as I remember, as has film, video, poetry, and art. It was through the work of people like Etel Adnan that I got to look at California differently and think about what it means to inhabit a space that's constantly alienating, infinitely beautiful, and simultaneously shaped by histories of violence, while also projecting this sense of home onto it.

In that sense, To Keep the Mountain at Bay is about world-building, for lack of a better word. Of having a space to exist, and from where to look and make sense of the world. The work experiments with working with multiple languages because the literature I've been interested in goes from South America to North Africa.

I didn't want to bind things to one region or type of experience, because many experiences and models have allowed me to look at exile and reinterpret it over and over.

SBThis idea of exile feeds into the second film you created for your Delfina Foundation show, The Retreat, which documents a project that involved bringing people together to reflect on exile. Could you introduce this work?

GKThat film required a great deal of coordination because the project centres around an actual retreat that I organised in the south of France. I've been thinking a lot about mental health, camps—concentration camps, detention camps—and holding spaces for refugees and asylum seekers.

As an artist, my approach—besides protesting things hands-on if I have the chance, or if it makes sense in a particular context—is how to create otherwise. How to create spaces where we can redefine ourselves and connect otherwise as political subjects.

For this project, I was thinking about how to create a way for people to go beyond the actual, physical borders that a lot of us have been unable to cross outside of Zoom and online interactions, especially in recent years.

So, I put out a call for a retreat and called it Exile Retreat. But I didn't want it to be a residency or some heavy application-based art project. I wanted it to be mostly focused on creating an affinity through shared politics.

The main requirement for the call was the experience of exile, which I tried to leave open enough to draw from a variety of experiences, and specific enough not to frame exile as some sort of universal condition. From that call, seven participants joined an online working group, and over three weeks we engaged in three sessions where we talked about research interests, experiences, and political affinities.

Thinking about exile as a space to convene, create, and be otherwise as political subjects, and knowing that some people engaged with the project could not travel internationally, I also wanted to organise a smaller in-person retreat. Out of the seven people, I invited three who were based in Europe and could travel, to the south of France with me and two other collaborators.

The idea was really about a bunch of refugees or exiles from vastly different backgrounds coming together in a non-camp or non-segregated setting to momentarily live together. But it wasn't a vacation. It was a retreat to live communally and see what comes out of that dynamic without having a scripted plan.

None of us had met in person or been to this specific place. My assistant director accompanied us to help with audio recordings and cinematography, and an artist I invited from Iran was in charge of making the props and costumes. Both had lived experiences and political views that resonated with the project's theme and were part of the group in every aspect of the retreat.

SBCould you give a sense of who the participants were?

GKThe group consisted of artists, writers, scholars, and people working across music, dance, film, and other media with roots in Palestine, Egypt, Venezuela, Belarus, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and Iran. There was an unspoken agreement to keep things real and fulfilling for all, both in the online sessions and in person.

I catered for the application in a particular way, too. I didn't ask for a portfolio, website, or resume, but for people to describe their experience of exile, why they wanted to share space with strangers, and what they thought the connection between anti-fascism and exile is. These brief but crucial questions helped me get an idea of who people were, as opposed to what they had achieved.

SBThe way you describe these three works at Delfina recalls a line from your essay for Perpetual Postponement, where you talk about this contradiction within some exile communities, who build simulacrum towns as monuments to their displacement.

That connects to your work Medina Wasl: Connecting Town and its focus on simulacrum towns in the Californian desert built for the U.S. military to rehearse incursions in the Middle East and West Asia, where this idea of colonialism or imperialism 'coming home' brings to mind the alienation experienced by the coloniser as their world expands as a result of their violence.

SBThis is in turn inverted in the alienation experienced by the displaced due to colonisation or imperialism, which is complicated by the fact that many of those displaced lacked a choice and ended up in the very country that had a hand in their displacement.

With that in mind, when you talk about The Retreat, are you trying to find relations through alienation? A way to create a post-alienated politics?

GKAbsolutely. I'm glad that you brought up Medina Wasl; with that project, I was interested in going into that world and seeing what I would get out of this simulacrum town that's supposed to resemble the thing that I don't exactly come from, but is supposed to be familiar enough.

I do try to address this in my work: connecting through a sense of alienation and making that your home, in some ways, but also identifying a sense of home in histories and sites of violence. That's why I opened Men of My Dreams with the tanks of the U.S. National Guard on the streets of Los Angeles, which felt oddly familiar and otherworldly at the same time.

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My memory is attuned to militarisation on both sides of the border; of militarised police and streets being controlled, and cleaning up after protests or after the city has been set on fire. But instead of standing on the sidelines and critiquing what I see, or trying to intellectualise it, I'm interested in going all the way in and having a bodily experience too.

I'm interested in how this idea of going in and then retreating and looking back at both sides would inform my ideas of home—this thing that I don't exactly come from.

SBYour video Memories of Loitering speaks to this idea of home as this thing that exists in memory, which relates to what you've said about the narrative of a lost home that can define the diaspora.

That longing connects to what you mentioned about trauma and narrative, and the identification with a traumatic history that displacement produces. In that sense, 'to go all the way in', as you say, comes back to mental health in the context of imperialism and globalisation.

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SBThinking about anti-imperialist Afro-Asian solidarity movements in the mid-20th century, when the Non-Aligned Movement tried to restructure an international economic system historically designed to extract wealth from the former colonies across a North-South axis, I'm fascinated by the fact that PTSD was first recognised by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, around the time Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher rejected North-South realignment at the Cancun conference in 1981.

When you think PTSD was first diagnosed in American Vietnam War veterans and was officially recognised amid the neoliberal turn, the idea of self-healing today as an individualised process feels like another form of capture. It prevents a common understanding of collective trauma from a historical perspective and limits collective healing, which Fanon discussed.

GKI think you touched on exactly the point that I would like to pick up in my research, and interestingly, you mentioned the Non-Aligned Movement and Afro-Asian solidarity or exchange, in terms of politics, or in developing a politics of anti-imperialism.

Thinking back to the 1960s and 70s, a lot of the 1979 Iranian Revolution's political literature, generally speaking, was influenced by movements in Latin America. Chile was a very influential place for the left in Iran, with the 1973 coup d'état and the socialist resistance, and people going into exile as a result.

Around the time, Iranian students were protesting the shah and monarchy, and whether in exile or through education exchanges in Europe, they met and got to know South American students and activists, specifically Chilean exiles. They would hear their protest chants and learn about Víctor Jara's poetry, for example. A lot of similar material was translated into Persian.

Is it possible to make a true space of solidarity in 2023 across our struggles? Is there a way to create a transnational political space like that today . . . ?

It was a unique moment of cultural and political exchange between two continents and two regions that wouldn't have happened in this way had it not been for exile. I wondered how we could remember these moments of relationality without romanticising them, or saying there is a blueprint.

Is it possible to make a true space of solidarity in 2023 across our struggles? Is there a way to create a transnational political space like that today—a real exchange in terms of sharing struggles and learning about different histories, their similarities and particularities?

With Exile Retreat, I wanted to give these questions a chance. Even if the project didn't work, we would still have something to move forward with, whether as a film or lived experience.

SBIs this where your research into the work of François Tosquelles comes in?

GKTosquelles has been really important for me in thinking about a methodology that is rooted in ethics and care. He trained as a psychiatrist and was very much a practitioner when he was at Saint-Alban hospital, where Fanon also trained and spent time working with Tosquelles after his publication of Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Tosquelles was concerned with a politics rooted in ethics, which was 'anti-concentrationist', or anti-carceral. He was part of the Spanish Communist Party but left because it took a Stalinist turn. He was Catalan, so he didn't identify as a Spanish subject, and the question of language was central in his thinking and practice, which was in French.

When he fled Spain to France, he was kept at Septfonds camp with other refugees. It was there that Paul Balvet, then director and warden of Saint-Alban hospital, recruited Tosquelles who was a trained psychiatrist to help run the hospital, which was under miserable conditions.

When Balvet left in 1943, Lucien Bonnafé and Tosquelles turned the asylum into a revolutionary site—a shelter for refugees and anti-fascist dissidents, and a horizontally run mental hospital, or in Camille Robcis' words, a 'laboratory of political invention to conceive a new "common"'.¹

So his entire engagement was how to turn Saint-Alban into something else: he did away with hierarchies between nurses, doctors, and patients, got rid of uniforms and the walls that separated patients from others, and integrated them into the surrounding community. He gave them rotating jobs and started a publication for and by the patients.

The double meaning of the word asylum was practised at this site in a way that brings together exile, anti-fascism, refuge, mental health, Marxism, and ethics, in endlessly interesting ways.

He insisted on combining psychoanalysis with psychiatric treatment. But for him, as a Marxist, psychoanalysis could not be this bourgeois practice of understanding the individual psyche towards individual healing but always had a collective and class aspect to it.

He also questioned the term 'mental hospital', stating that he prefers the word 'asylum' because it 'implies that someone is seeking refuge, or somebody has been forced to take refuge'. This is not ironic when we remember that Saint-Alban sheltered Jews fleeing persecution, and later, under Bonnafé's direction, members of the armed communist resistance against nazis.

The double meaning of the word asylum was practised at this site in a way that brings together exile, anti-fascism, refuge, mental health, Marxism, and ethics, in endlessly interesting ways. I think that's why I've been so fascinated by this history.

SBYour Exile Retreat in France took place near Saint-Alban hospital, right?

GKYes, the idea for Exile Retreat was to be in proximity to this place. The house we stayed in was a 45-minute drive from the hospital and I wanted us to visit and wander around.

Of course, the hospital is not the radical place it once used to be. It's an ordinary mental health facility now with a very small number of patients. But they still have a strong art therapy programme. There's also a beautiful church built by patients during Tosquelles' time that was very special to visit.

When you have to deal with the bureaucracy of seeking asylum in Germany or the U.S., you know there is no safe space, even among your supposed kin, and learn to live with that fact.

We visited around, just sitting in the cafe, interacting with whomever, and looking at the old château where they have art exhibitions and a visitor centre. The site is also on the path of the Camino de Santiago hike (The Way of St. James), so a lot of hikers go through the hospital campus.

There was something about the six of us there that created a singular experience of the place that we wouldn't have had without the vantage point of the collective. Being able to process what that experience was like for each of us afterwards as a group was eye-opening to me. I don't know what it would have been like had I just been in L.A. researching and reading books, or if I visited by myself.

SBHow far did you get in exploring healing otherwise through the Exile Retreat?

GKWould I call it healing? Maybe not. But there was a sense of longing and loss. Every discussion we had either online or during the retreat gave me more to think about.

In the last online session, it was hard to hang up. Unless I am projecting, I felt like we all wanted to linger even though it was not materially possible because we all had lives and jobs we needed to get on with in different time zones. I wish there was a way of sustaining those conversations but part of me also knows these experiences are more impactful in their ephemerality and smaller scale.

But in terms of healing, it's interesting. Our online sessions were small and for lack of a better word, intended as a safe space. But we also discussed these terms: healing, safe space, trigger, and so on, and whether they mean anything to us. When you have to deal with the bureaucracy of seeking asylum in Germany or the U.S., you know there is no safe space, even among your supposed kin, and learn to live with that fact.

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SBThinking about how you try to avoid the fetishisation of exile, which you have observed in contemporary art, how did you approach turning Exile Retreat into a film?

GKWhen I received the invitation for this exhibition, I thought that I could sit in my room and visually expand on my piece for Perpetual Postponement, maybe collaborate with friends or make an essay film, but I wanted to come together with people I would have no other way of convening with and make a process-based film.

I wanted to see if I could make a film that's mine but isn't scripted or directed by me and gives people the chance to be themselves without showing their faces, centring their trauma, or even telling the narrative of their "thriving" despite the odds, and so on.

This was not going to be a film about exile as some utopia, or where I put someone in front of the camera and ask them to tell me their life story. Of course, the absence of hierarchy at first caused confusion for all of us. I could only set up a structure with what I didn't want to do and communicated that clearly to everyone.

The first night that we arrived at our rental, I told people that all I was expecting was for them to have a meal; we would all take turns cooking and contributing to cleaning. And of course, it was a bit awkward to share space with people you had never met in real life.

We were sitting around cooking, eating, drinking wine, and chatting, but I wasn't recording anything. Then loosely, we came up with the schedule for meals and visits. Then we started talking about the film. I asked everyone to think about their props and what they wanted to make.

The next day we moved tables around and made an office for my collaborator, Golrokh Nafisi, who was going to help with making the props. Her workstation became a convening and meeting place. She would sit there with her sewing machine and chat with others about their ideas and things began to happen organically. But there were a lot of risk factors that could have led to there being no material outcome from this process.

I shot the film on two 16-millimetre Bolex cameras, as I had done for Medina Wasl. Shooting with a Bolex is a strategy to slow down and not fetishise the documentary or cinematic event. Because no matter what I do, every 30 seconds I need to wind this machine; loss becomes part of the process.

SBLooking back to rial and tERROR from 2011, which is anchored to your biography, through to Medina Wasl in 2018, when you move away from that fixed point of reference and explore the oscillating dialectic of existing between, The Retreat seems to seek a method in that oscillation.

What have you learned from the experience? Did The Retreat open a new way of working for you?

GKI'm still processing it. I found home in this way of making that I would like to further explore, but I'm also aware these experiences are impactful because they're one-offs and a lot of things are not meant to be repeated. Looking back at Tosquelles, the method didn't even work for Fanon. He had to rework them in a colonial context so they'd make sense.

The joy that came from being in that collective space and working collectively was something I had never experienced. Of course, I invited people to be a part of a work. But the negotiation of what to ask of people and how to think about power dynamics constantly was important in the process. Especially as an antithesis to how the art [industry] expects us to work as individuals and how it sustains itself based on that premise.

There was also a lot of trust from Delfina Foundation and Eliel Jones, the guest curator whom I had worked with before, when I came up with this crazy idea of becoming my own mini-institution within the institution, and managing international travel, bookings, driving, and going to places where I'd never been to work with strangers and make a film. But they were okay with it, so I took the opportunity and have no regrets.

I'm not saying that it was always a smooth process that revealed a way to work in the future, but as an experiment, I got to know how people want to be directed. When there is no director's voice, film-wise or otherwise, most people feel lost. We had only six days but I needed to give time for everyone to find themselves within the dynamics of the group and context, and comfortably come forward without me having to direct them.

Towards the end, different dynamics began to develop between the rest of the group and my role as the organiser or director dissipated. Everybody was so committed to the production that I didn't have to push for anything; it was mind-blowing to see that transformation between so-called strangers.

SBWorking together really is the Achilles heel of fascism.

GKYes, strangers coming together and relating really is. I don't want to romanticise it and say this is the formula to fight, that it's easy, or we're always on the same page. But instead of being a solo project about exile and anti-fascism, it became an experience that I and the others could share, learn from, and look back on. And I learned a lot.

Besides the collaborations in the making of The Retreat, there's also the voiceover. To write the script, I turned to The Invention of Morel, a 1940 sci-fi novel about images and apparatus of recording and retention by Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, which was also adapted into a film.

A writer from Venezuela flees to a desert island, where he encounters a museum in what feels like an abandoned resort. In the museum's basement, he discovers Morel's invention: a machine that renders people infinite through their images.

If the roaring lion of our collective consciousness is sleeping, what is the lion dreaming of?

The novel is from the vantage point of the fugitive who falls in love with (the image of) a woman, but he cannot intervene to find out if the figures he sees are real. Until he does, and realises he's alone. None of the people he saw, including the woman he loves, are real.

I edited down the novel, much like the process with Gulliver's Travels, into a condensed few minutes as an introduction for the film. The voiceover is read by a friend and filmmaker, Valentina Alvarado Matos, from the original Spanish version. It sets the tone of the film for viewers to keep questioning if the events truly happened—and if only imagined, by whom?

The film ends with a scene of five people carrying the fragmented image of the sleeping lion from Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin (1925), returning to the question: if the roaring lion of our collective consciousness is sleeping, what is the lion dreaming of? —[O]

¹ Camille Robcis, 'Introduction. In Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France', The University of Chicago Press, 2021, p. 12.