Nostalgia for a World Not Yet Actualized Queer Utopia in the Work of Hushidar Mortezaie by BAHAAR AHSAN
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n his book Cruising Utopia, Jose Esteban Muñoz theorizes queer utopia as “an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” For Muñoz, queer utopia is about a turn away from the here and now, and towards the then and there, a utopian futurity that, though historically grounded and necessarily concrete, may never be fully actualized but rather exists as a potentiality toward which we are constantly moving. Muñoz emphasizes aesthetics and performance as central to the project of utopia in which he is invested, asserting that queer aesthetics “map future social relations” and that queer utopianism is necessarily about performance and about a “doing” toward futurity. The work of interdisciplinary artist Hushidar “Hushi” Mortezaie, and in particular the performance Fadat Besham, is invested, I argue, in precisely this project. The performance, staged at the Minnesota Street Project gallery in San Francisco on the evening of March 30, 2019 during a reception for the exhibition Once at Present, curated by Taraneh Hemami and Kevin B. Chen, activated the affect of nostalgia which has come to characterize cultural production in Iranian diaspora, and displaced that affect onto queer militant transhistorical subjects, rendering this nostalgia illegible and unhinging it from the romantic and linear temporality and spatiality of the dominant Iranian nostalgia. It is in this unhinged space, this space of illegibility, that Hushi renegotiates relationships to place, space, history, and time, and forges a new kind queer Iranian utopianism. The start of the performance was signaled by the sound of men chanting “Allahu Akbar” in Persian accents blasting from the gallery speakers and echoing throughout the space, followed by “Bahaaraan Khojaste Baad,” a popular song celebrating the success of the 1979 Revolution in Iran. The auditory experience that opened this performance was affectively and politically loaded for the crowd, largely comprised of Iranian-Americans
who left Iran during or following the 1979 Revolution. These sounds and the historical moments they signified quickly activated distinct responses within each of the attendees— bringing into the space the feelings of loss, nostalgia, and mourning tied to the revolution. The sound of the revolutionary soroud quickly faded into music reminiscent American club music of the 1970s and 1980s, as performers emerged into the space clad in clothes designed by Mortezaie. This performance, like much of Mortezaie’s body of work, was characterized by a sort of multidirectional citation; that is, aesthetic reference to multiple temporalities in queer, Iranian, and Iranian diasporic life which are often positioned as ideologically oppositional. One performer descended the stairs in a collage-like graphic outfit with pictures of Fereydoun Farrokhzad and pre-Revolution newspaper clippings, followed by another performer dressed in a green jumpsuit evocative of Iranian paramilitary soldiers with the word “Enghelab,” or revolution, printed on a patch in the back, and yet another performer wore clothes covered graphically in Old Persian script. The sound of queer club music continues to fill the space as the performers descend the gallery’s staircase one by one. The kinds of gesture being performed, characterized by things like hand performance and dips, became quickly and easily legible as vogueing to those in the crowd familiar with the art form which emerged from Black and brown queer ballroom culture. Through these references, Hushi’s work contends with multiple and complex relationships to history, temporality, and place. The work is rich with symbols that point to a number of historical moments, each charged with a different political and ideological valence: the reverence for Persian empire that is embedded within royalist ethnonationalism, the militancy attributed to the 1979 Revolution, and the resistant and celebratory queer 20