الو الو ؟ It Happened / Archive in Fragments, System in Ruins

Avideh Saadatpajouh's MFA defence
Thursday, April 9, 2026 | 10:30 AM
Room 4955 (small cinema)
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

The installation الو الو ؟ It Happened / Archive in Fragments, System in Ruins, my MFA graduation project presented at the Audain Gallery in September 2025, emerges from an inquiry into how orientation operates within contemporary media systems. Sculptural objects are distributed throughout the gallery so that visitors encounter them sequentially as they move through the space, where sound, gesture, distance, and signal participate in shaping perception, guiding each experience through a shifting field of relations.

Together, these objects compose what I call the City of Ruins—an environment in which fragments of different systems remain active simultaneously, including media infrastructures, surveillance mechanisms, personal archives, and technological circuits.

Before I learned to recognize feedback loops, infrastructures, or assemblages, I encountered a more immediate form of circulation: the movement of images from one living room to another. In Tehran, media did not always arrive through official channels; it travelled through quieter routes—borrowed machines, duplicated tapes, and conversations whispered in stairwells. Images crossed thresholds carried by people rather than broadcast by institutions. These informal pathways formed an alternative network long before I had the language to describe it. Looking back, I understand this circulation as the first fragment of the City of Ruins: a system operating within the gaps of another system.