Gelare Khoshgozaran: rial & tERROR, 2011. Video, 16:27 min, image courtesy the artist and OtherIS.

Over a trial and error, it occurred to me that if “trial” lends a “t” to an error, our currency, rial, becomes “terror.”
What becomes of a generation who has been deprived of those trivial enjoyments of life without having to feel guilty? The essential contradiction between a constant feeling of guilt imprinted on one by the suppressions of religion, ideology and traditional society, and the force of desire to break through these boundaries while calling for a substitute shapes the heart of the post Islamic Revolutionary generation of Iranians. It is probably this desire that largely causes misconceptions about capitalism and its relationship to notions such as “fun,” “entertainment,” or “freedom” in a country such as Iran.
As a member of the generation succeeding a society’s becoming capitalized and westernized by a monarchy, a society that years later, through the Islamic Revolution, also experienced an attempted erasure of capitalism, I am interested in looking at the visual material circulating in the media, from TV commercials and pop music videos to home video footage; primary elements that contributed to the formation of an image of this historical and transitional period. This imagery was one of the many factors that contributed to the hybridity of my generation that was born out of this synthesis of the inevitable collision of modernization, the technological so-called democracy and a traditional society.