How to Abolish a Name
In How to Abolish a Name, Aria Farajnezhad turns to one of Iran’s early national bank buildings, built in 1928, to ask how modernisation made antiquity speak as the image of a modern nation. The work traces how pre-Islamic origin, Aryanism, Persian Orientalism and nationalist desire were built into architecture, language and naming, while Islamic, Arab and non-Persian histories were cast as obstacles to progress. To abolish the name Aria, then, is not to erase it, but to interrupt the fantasy of purity it carries, to loosen the body, the building and the city from a fantasmatic genealogy that made exclusion appear natural.
Taking the video essay as its point of departure, the lecture explores the temporality of return and asks what it means to return to a past that has already been selected, purified and made to authorise the image of a nation and a future already imagined in advance. When does return reactivate historical memory, and when does it repeat the fantasy of origin?
In 2017, the building was refunctioned as the National Bank Museum. The bank becomes a museum not as a break, but as the completion of its own logic: capital accumulated as value, antiquity accumulated as evidence, heritage accumulated as origin. The building stores money and time in the same gesture, turning national memory into another form of reserve. In How to Abolish a Name, this reserve can no longer remain stable. What has been accumulated to secure the fantasy of coherence begins to turn inward, producing the conditions of its own implosion.
The lecture will be followed by a screening of Aria Farajnezhad’s video essay How to Abolish a Name (2025).
Lecture/Workshop/Bar Night
2 – 4 PM //On the Notion of Return
Workshop
7 PM //How to Abolish a Name
lecture with Aria Farajnezhad @aria_fn and
Azadeh Sarjoughian @azadeh.sarjoughian
8 – 11 PM //Gathering
Bar Night
The Summer Bar is a project by kunst- und kulturverein spedition
Veranstaltungsübersicht