Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting the project and to Ontario Arts Council for exhibition assistance.
Thanks to David Findlay for recording set up, Konrad Skreta at Charles Street Video for superb job in cleaning the live recording sound, Charles Street Video http://charlesstreetvideo.com/ for supporting the production and post-production for all the video components of the show and to Ontario Arts Council for supporting the exhibition.
In April 2000, the New York Times published a report written in 1954 by one of the CIA agents who had designed operation TPAJAX, the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran. Shortly after the publication of this report, the Clinton Administration, for the first time in nearly 50 years, publicly acknowledged the involvement of the US government in the overthrow of the popular nationalist government of Mohamad Mossadeq. On the 60th anniversary of the coup, Ouster Remixed culls from diverse sources to tell the story that the New York Times, the CIA report and the Clinton Administration wouldn’t.
Ouster Remixed is part of Gita Hashemi’s larger project which also includes the installation Pathology of an Ouster and the website Headquarters. Sampled, remixed and edited by the artist, the script freely combines excerpts from historical documents, first-hand accounts, and scholarly texts. These include the original US-UK plan for the coup; selections from books and articles by Iran scholars E. Abrahamian, M. Gasiorowsky and N. Keddie among others; and personal narratives and testimonies contributed by the performers including: S. Abu-Sharar, J. Cypher, N. Golkar, A. Mustafa, N. Nadesan, and P. Samadzadeh in Toronto; and T. Castellanos, J. Grenier, N. Khanjani, E. Lotayef, N. Machouf and B. Reed in Montreal. Full bibliography here.
The performances were shaped collaboratively with the participants through workshop processes in January and February 2013 in Toronto, and in November 2013 in Montreal.
Remix is “the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms.” [Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory] While maintaining some material resemblance to the original, in remix process, the samples are usually altered to suit the new concept, creative intention and form, as they have been in Ouster Remixed.
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