Translated by Louise Pain

How can we approach a work that evolves and unfurls across aesthetic, political, historical, and speculative poetic dimensions without neglecting any one of these elements? The short answer is that it is probably not so easy. After all, the aesthetic and political aspects of a work cannot be considered in isolation. Aria Farajnezhad’s work not only embraces this multidimensionality; it also succeeds in bringing its various dimensions together in a productive way.

At the Kunstverein Hannover, Farajnezhad is currently presenting two of his works. The first exhibition room features the video installation How to Abolish a Name (2025), while the second houses the expansive installation Die Blumen fraßen, wofür sie bestimmt waren / The Flowers Devoured What They Were Meant For (2026). Taking as its starting point one of the first buildings of the National Bank of Iran to be erected in Tehran, the video piece explores the interconnections between the construction of national identity, capitalist modernisation, and Europe’s influence in Iran during the early Pahlavi period (1925–1941).

‘It’s also like a result of a longer research engagement with one of the first national bank buildings in Tehran, but also about how the building itself is emblematic of a nation-state building that is centred around the identity, the language of Persian. But also there’s a lot of critique when it comes to capitalist modernity and the different modes of accumulation that take place in the modern bank system. And then there is this water tower that I’m very curious about. In the video there is this speculative scenario that the water tower starts to flood the premises. And so it’s basically like a documentary fiction and it’s also a nice way to enter the two works.’ ^[1]

This is not the first time Farajnezhad has digitally overturned a bank in one of his video works. In Toppled from the Horizontal Axis (2022), he rotated Bremen’s Central Bank building, which had long stood empty, by 90 degrees, turning the axis of its stairwell—an emblematic metaphor for hierarchic structures, if there is one—into a horizontally oriented architecture. In his video work that is currently on display at the Kunstverein, the building of the National Bank of Iran is flooded with water from a neighbouring water tower. During the intervals between the video sequences, the verses of the Kurdish folk and love song ‘Gulnishan’ (English: ‘like a flower’), sung by the artist’s mother, Lida Ghaderpanah, can be heard. Her voice reaches us in muffled, intermittent bursts, as if it were fighting its way through several layers of insulation. The song has circulated over time in a number of versions and variations; the iteration featured in Farajnezhad’s video work is based on an older Sorani rendition. Its lyrics grapple with themes of separation, alienation, and loyalty, while its title appeals to the singer’s object of desire via the imagery of a flower (gul گوڵ ).

‘And it talks; it kind of addresses the beloved through the image of a flower. And it talks about displacement; it talks about this estrangement. It talks about how the person will hold their oath or their promise, despite all the challenges that are imposed upon them.’

The imagery of the flower not only ushers us into the next room acoustically, in the direction of the second work; it also reappears here in visual form. Across the walls of this second space, a sequence of floral ceramic elements unfurls, framed by a frieze of heavily fragmented diamond shapes composed of intersecting diagonal lines. Yet this installation, which at first glance seems almost deceptively beautiful, is so much more than mere decorative ornamentation.

‘I wanted the audience to be in the room and even maybe enjoy it. I mean, it’s a beauty that hopefully does not allow you to feel in peace and quiet fully. If you spend time with it, you get to know more and more.’

Even at the three points at which the floral motifs are interrupted by depictions of goods manufactured by the arms and metal industries—cannons, locomotives, and steam engines—it is already clear that these flowers are not quite as harmless, delicate, or inviting as they initially appeared. Visitors who are familiar with the architecture and history of Hanover may recognise that the installation at the Kunstverein is modelled after the façade of the Hanomag industrial complex in the city’s Linden district. The factory building, which was originally a cannon workshop, still stands at Deisterplatz. With its Orientalist-style tiles and majolica borders, it was erected in 1916, built to designs by architect Alfred Sasse (1870–1937) and flanked by two personifications representing Industry and Labour. At the time of its construction, the company Hannoversche Maschinenbau AG—whose name was subsequently abbreviated to Hanomag—manufactured locomotives and railway equipment for the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad Railway. Following the completion of the Anatolian Railway connections to Istanbul, Ankara, and Konya in the 1890s, the Berlin–Baghdad line was intended to extend the infrastructure of the German Empire in the direction of its eastern colonies, ultimately reaching a port on the Persian Gulf and bypassing the route through the Suez Canal, which at the time was under French and British control. The construction of the Berlin–Baghdad Railway was financed in part by Deutsche Bank and planned by Philipp Holzmann AG—the same company that had previously also built the Reichstag building and the Anatolian Railway.

‘So, it’s like 1916, when the building was erected, it’s the same year that the railway is being laid out. And it’s also the same year that the deportation happens.’

In contrast to the original façade of the Hanomag building, which prominently displays the company’s own products in many more places, in Farajnezhad’s appropriation—or rather, translation—most of these images are replaced with telegrams reproducing excerpts from telegrams exchanged between the Baghdad Railway construction administration in Constantinople and the German Foreign Office in Berlin in 1916, some of which were also circulated to Deutsche Bank. While the Ottoman Empire’s deportation, systematic persecution, and murder of Armenians were already well underway, the railway needed workers.

‘We’re talking about the Anatolian region, the German interest in the expansion of the inland connection to the Mesopotamian region, oil fields, but also resources and the ability to ship armaments. We’re talking about the First World War. We’re talking about the Armenian skilled workers that they used to construct the railway, the bridges, the tunnels. And simultaneously, the Ottoman administration starts to deport the Armenians at large, but the workers as well.’

The reproductions of telegrams—the originals of which are housed in the Deutsche Bank archive in Frankfurt—reveal highlighted fragments of negotiations concerning Armenian workers, both skilled and unskilled, who were employed by the German railway. While the railway construction provided some Armenian workers with temporary protection from deportation, the Ottoman railway network was also used to facilitate deportations during the Armenian Genocide. These were among the first railway systems directly used to facilitate the genocide, when Armenian women and children were deported by train to Konya in 1915 and subsequently driven into the Syrian desert. Concentration camps were also set up at railway stations. Meanwhile, both the Reichstag and the German press remained silent by mutual agreement on the issue of the Armenians and the genocide being perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire—an ally of the German Empire. Karl Liebknecht was among only a handful of people to publicly speak out against it. The bureaucratic telegrams, however, bear unintended witness to these events. In Farajnezhad’s work, the Orientalist façade, which had previously remained silent about its own history, finds a voice—not only via the telegrams, but also in a vivid, material, and visual sense. The ornamental motifs, once used to celebrate technological and industrial hegemony and later appropriated by the Nazis as a canvas for their propaganda, undergo a metamorphosis here. Interrupted by the telegrams, they morph into creatures equipped with tongues, devouring their own history of complicity. As if finally acquiring agency of their own, they disrupt the silence, at least in visual terms.

‘I try to pick up on this ornamental figure and start to subvert it, give it a different agency that is not a complacent element that only decorates. It starts to become a witness. Often you start with very dry research with the facts. With problematising and understanding. You know, kind of politicising the aesthetic that already stands there. And at some point, I always look for some sort of speculative turn that is informed by the political but also, at the same time, as radical imagination that breaks from the rigidity of what happened and asks how else it can be imagined or how else it can be actively fought for.’

Forensic and investigative approaches intertwine with poetic and speculative elements, bringing the past into dialogue with the present and opening up the possibility of a different kind of future. This raises not only the question of what might happen if these otherwise silent floral ornaments were to break free from their mute existence on the building’s façade, but also, more urgently, how we might engage today with architecture that is burdened by this kind of history. The publication that accompanies the exhibition, as well as the reading by Dorsa Eidizadeh and Farajnezhad, that took place on the 1^st of October, includes still another voice: neither the voice of pragmatic industry nor that of technological domination, but that of an Armenian feminist poet. Throughout it, the oppressive, overwhelming moments are repeatedly offset by words taken from Shushanik Kurghinian’s 1907 poem ‘The Workers’:

‘We are the ones coming…!

We, the Workers—

Comrades in sorrow and tears,

Half-starved life, prison, and exile…!

We, the workers—

Twisted in the drive to live and cheaply sold

In the base marketplace of existence…!

O monstrous leeches!’ [2]

^[1] All quotes that do not feature an explicit reference are taken from the author’s interview with the artist conducted specifically for this article.

^[2] Translation taken from Shushan Avagyan (2012), ‘Shushanik Kurghinian’s The Workers’, Ianyan Magazine, 18 March 2012.

Aria Farajnezhad is an artist and researcher working across moving image, sound, installation, ceramics and writing. His practice investigates how histories of violence, extraction and political power become embedded in infrastructures, architectures and systems of representation. Moving between archival research, site-based inquiry and speculative forms of narration, his recent work has engaged with colonial visual regimes, the Berlin–Baghdad Railway, the Armenian Genocide, and contemporary technologies of deep-sea imaging and carbon storage.