Peter Freund Projects

Transcript from the discussion following a recent reprise exhibition of the Iran|Usa trilogy. (The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity).

Hudson Milliner Art Salon
Special Screening
February 28, 2026

Iran|Usa:
Acorus Calamus
The End of an Error
Erased Mossadegh

Artist talk with dialogue (by Zoom)

Moderator:
We want to open up to the floor. But first, Peter, if you'd like to introduce yourself, how you entered filmmaking, and something about this work of yours we just screened, that would be wonderful. 

Peter Freund (artist)
Many thanks to the Salon for your invitation and for arranging the event. The room is a bit dark but it’s nice to see everyone. Given the events in the Middle East today– 

Moderator:
Sorry but we’re having trouble hearing you.

PF:
Let me check my audio settings, sorry…. Better?

Moderator:
Better.

PF:
So, the timing of this screening is obviously super-charged, given the attacks in the Middle East this morning. And the situation today urges us –

Moderator:
Uh, you’re frozen. The Internet connection is unstable. 

[Internet is restored.]

PF:
Well, the situation today compels us to speak directly about politics. And yet –

[Internet is disrupted.]

Moderator:
Your image is moving but lagging behind your audio. Let’s check the WiFi.

[Internet is restored.]

PF:
…and yet this artistic context …

Moderator:
Better, yes good.

PF:
…the art gallery setting implicitly but emphatically asks that we talk about the political situation, sure, but through the apparent detour of art. 

[A series of interruptions of the video chat link arises but is finally resolved.]

Moderator:
I think we’ve remedied the situation.

PF:
Well, ok, to answer the question about my entry into making films, it turns out that these technical interruptions are related. The draw of the moving image for me was partly that you could throw anything and everything into a film (picture, sound, noise, text, music; cited or fabricated materials) but more to the point with the moving image there’s this persistent question of synchronization. We always start with a time gap. 

[Internet holds.]

PF:
The asynchronous jumble, however meticulously planned, for better or worse, has to be synchronized in one way or another. And the asynchrony jumps to another level. I’m sure everyone has walked into a gallery or museum and come upon a film being presented in installation format. The sensation one gets, unlike that in the traditional cinema, is that one is always arriving too late or too early or both. We typically feel out of sync with the image. 

That’s a sensation that the whole apparatus of the traditional cinema militates against, armed with its bolted-down chairs, house lights, scheduled start times, previews, opening and closing credits, and so forth. Just to be clear: What’s at stake is not the passivity foisted upon the spectator. That’s the strength of cinema proper. What is at stake is the fact that we are all fundamentally out of sync with ourselves.

We know it because of moments like internet glitches that destabilize our sense of shared simultaneity. We know it; we just don’t like to notice it. We want to keep talking, letting the flow continue. But it’s the nature of human subjectivity: we talk and our words and images never fully capture, let alone keep up with, the experience they retroactively depict. Why do we talk in the first place? It’s because we each are already interrupted. That interruption is the basis of the social link. 

Audience member:
The connection seems fine now.

PF:
(Laughs) Thank God. … Ok, I’d like to draw a contrast. Before encountering the technical issues, we faced a thematic coincidence: the current political crisis between the US/Israel and Iran and the pre-scheduled screening of my installation trilogy linking the USA and Iran. And here’s the difference to note: We don’t feel this coincidence as deliberately synchronized, it wasn’t planned or fabricated but it is a synchronization run by chance or the uncanny. As such the contingent coincidence easily heightens the degree of our urgency combined with a feeling of some utopic flight of fancy. The underlying gap in the coincidence – its strange asynchrony – is not much of an annoyance, if at all, nor does it pose an obstacle like the internet interruption. It seems more of an occasion, at least a prompt, maybe even a gift of sorts. 

Successful or not, this sort of synchronization is akin to the experience I’m after when working with the moving image: again, a contingent coincidence. 

[Internet holds.]

PF:
Ok, enough, we can return to the topic of synchronization via historical memory, translation, and false testimony – problems shown in the trilogy – but let’s now open things to the floor and see where we go.  

Moderator:
Does anyone have questions? 

Audience member:
All your work tonight is in Farsi with English subtitles. It works really well. The Farsi offers a distance yet brings you close again to the work. And juxtaposing the whole Mossadegh question brings it even closer. So, I'm curious what drew you to Farsi.

Moderator:
This speaker lived in Iran from 1973 up to the 1979 revolution when she was forced out.

PF:
The coupling of Farsi and English for me is key. It asserts the most basic coincidence in this set of installations. In fact, in one of them, the translation carries a major problem and reversal of expectation, which becomes the central concept of that work: that is, Acorus Calamus. In short, the connection between the image of the US flag blowing in the breeze and the narration that tells an oblique tale imagining what is happening beneath the flag comes through the secondary language, the English. As the translation, the English subtitles appear to be a secondary gloss for an audience that doesn’t speak Farsi. But the odd thing is that the juncture where the words meet or synchronize with the image occurs in the random and oblique puns on the word «flag»: conflagration, flagellation, persiflage, etc. None of these words is found in the Farsi. So, what is going on here? There is a twist in the synchronization of image and word that comes through the triangulation of the image and the split language. That’s the crux of the piece. 

But to get to your question: My initial curiosity in Farsi came not through the language or the region per se, although I lived in the Middle East during my university days. My curiosity came through art. In the 1990s I was exposed to the films of the Iranian New Wave. I came to feel that the most adventurous and important cinema was being made in Iran. Forugh Farrokhzad, Kiarostami and Mahmalbaf in particular, but there were others. At that time I was meeting and began working with Iranian émigrés, including the actor and theatre director Nasser Rahmaninejad, who did the translations and recitations for all three works you saw tonight.

Audience member:
And what about the connection in The End of an Error between the McCarthy hearings and the Farsi narration?

PF:
It’s a contingent association, maybe absurdist, a temporal pun from which The End of an Error springs. The years 1954 and 1953 present a kind of historical film dissolve strangely linking the US and Iran. The piece shows a video triptych of displaced (internally asynchronous) imagery from the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. The hearings, by the way, were broadcast as the first televised political hearings of their kind, a landmark use of the medium. They made a bald-faced display before the US public (there were 180 hours of footage) of McCarthy’s dirty tricks and red-baiting tactics. This broadcast marked the beginning of the end of the anti-communist period in US history. Surely a liberal triumph as reflected by the memorable pre-empitive plea for «decency» by Joseph Welch, the attorney for the army. The year before, 1953, as you know, the Prime Minister of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh, who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry, his life’s work, was subsequently overthrown in the U.S.-orchestrated coup d’état, the first operation of the newly-formed CIA. The story of the coup will come back in the third segment of the trilogy, Erased Mossadegh.

Audience member:
And Roy Cohn who served as McCarthy’s young counsel was later the infamous mentor of Donald Trump. 

PF:
Yes, and as a footnote, at the risk of overstating the obvious, the US president routinely invokes synchronization: It’s the rhetorical basis of MAGA and, similarly, in the call to restore the previous grandeur of Iran.

Audience member:
Yeah, that makes sense: to synchronize the present with the past. But what does that even mean, to return to the era of the Shah?

PF:
Indeed. This 1953-1954 «historical film dissolve» presents a shift in organizing phantasms in the US imagination. It’s a move from anti-communism to what would later become the terrorist state. But in the «dissolving» moment, something quite uncertain opens up. Such ambiguity is achieved, at least at the rhetorical level, in the words of the army’s attorney, Joseph Welch, when he calls out to McCarthy, «Have you no sense of decency, sir? After all, have you no sense of decency?» Admittedly a liberal gesture to restore a status quo, the collapse of anti-communism was at the same time followed historically by the movements for civil rights, free speech, women’s rights etc. So the «historical dissolve» presents an opening whose entrants are not simply pre-defined. Only retroactively might we think that. From our standpoint in 2026, Welch’s decisive gesture startles to the extent that it aligns the law and decency. Today we seem to live, despite the seemingly futile outcries of the liberal press, under a logic shifting from the transgression of law to the law of transgression. To convict a head of state of felonies bolsters his popularity. Here one may feel compelled to agree with the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek that the Trumpian aesthetic strangely realizes the radical leftist dream of May 1968: to enjoy without restraint («Jouissez sans entraves!»). 

Audience member: 
Why does he say «Trumpian aesthetic»?

PF:
Actually, he doesn’t. To use the term «aesthetic» introduces a slight twist in order to segue into a recurring theme: the politics of enjoyment. For example, what role does enjoyment play in historical memory? What mobilizes the law of transgression? Why is the «other» always stealing «our» enjoyment? At a more literal level of aesthetics, there is another dimension of the 1953-1954 «dissolve». That is, a reference to the 1953 conceptual artwork by Robert Rauschenberg, namely, «The Erased de Kooning», to which my piece Erased Mossadegh alludes. In Rauschenberg‘s piece, he takes a work in progress by the then-reigning master of the New York art scene (who volunteers the work) and Rauschenberg then proceeds painstakingly to erase it. In a famous interview, the artist made a few somewhat unflattering comments about the movement of Abstract Expressionism, after which he was asked if «The Erased de Kooning» was intended as an act of rebellion. Rauschenberg replies that it was not. What is it then, he was asked. He answers quite simply: «poetry».

Moderator:
But your erasure has to do with using false testimony to indicate the distortion of the historical record about the Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh. 

PF:
Yes, it’s a good question. That installation inverts what Rauschenberg did in a sense. Ultimately it uses excerpts from elaborate published lies, omissions and exaggerations (put in the mouth of the actor playing Mossadegh) to outline the truth as missing. But in some sense, it is the disturbance of asserting false testimonies that performs the erasure and brings forward the truth as a gap, something that should be distinguished from demonstrable facts, and that comes forward only in a flash. This was my response to the common complaint against «alt-facts» as untruth. No, I think the situation is much more enigmatic. I mean, this point is revealed by the near-absolute lack of leverage wielded by counter-factual arguments in current politics. At the very least, truth must be differentiated from facts.

Audience member:
I have a set of random rambling associations with your artwork. But I’ll try to boil them down to two things. I try to be active in politics and to educate myself. I feel I grew up never having been encouraged to question the sources of current realities. I go to town hall meetings where I live and each time walk by portraits of white men lining the corridors. To me the whole thing comes down to a question of accountability which is increasingly being eroded in our society. Transparency and clarity of understanding how systems work. Those are crucial for understanding history and living in a democratic society. By the way, what do you think about Abbie Hoffman organizing in 1967 to levitate the Pentagon as a form of protest?

PF:
Yes, thank you for your comment. I’m afraid I’ve been rambling about background politics, at best as material inspirations and reference points, at the expense of differentiating the art. About levitating the Pentagon, well the absurdist gesture is appealing, why not? Yet the idea always struck me that it was more of an hysterical reassurance to the Pentagon. The performance ironically seemed to represent the hallucinatory impotence of the public. But I think it’s pretty clear that most people, including Hoffman, didn’t see it that way; instead, it was taken as a political affirmation of popular power. The End of an Error shares a tenor similar to the town hall corridor of white men. Maybe the question for art is not how to fairly and fully represent the historical diversity but how to preserve and «reframe» the existing images as a hopelessly bygone iconography. Here you make me think of the artist Fred Wilson and his innovations within what art history has come to call «institutional critique».

Audience member:
No, I don’t know his work. 

PF:
I think you might be interested in pieces of Wilson’s like Mining the Museum. In collaboration with an historical museum, Wilson peruses the institution’s entire collection and then curates a show presenting together routinely-exhibited objects with those that are part of the museum’s holdings but that are never exhibited. In this case, it was metalware, including (as I recall) metal goblets, mugs, pitchers etc., juxtaposed beside slave shackles. All these objects from the same period are brought together in the same vitrine. This approach to making art interests me, as you might guess from what I’ve already said. In short, it presents materials so as to pose gaps and contradictions that are associational but not definitive in meaning. 

Audience member:
Sounds super interesting. When looking at your work, it was almost like looking at tarot cards where you observe what’s coming up for you and free associate. With The End of an Error, the piece with McCarthy, I was fascinated by the increasing flattening out of everything, for example, when the Farsi narrative turns more and more toward the gestures of the figures while the image is jumping back and forth in time and the narration is synchronized to this transformed superficial aspect that seems to have nothing to do with politics or anything but gestures: how the men take off and put on their glasses, how they hold or reach for documents, etc – apparently meaningless details.

PF:
I like the comparison to tarot cards in the sense that chance intervenes to evoke a feeling of necessity in the one whose cards are being read. Not that the cards really hold the facts in a predictive sense but that a chain of associations is sparked. Your comment also gives me a chance to say that I think clarity and transparency as an access point to accountability have an important place in politics, just as you say. And yet I think that art in some sense presents the exact opposite: the strength of art is that it fogs things up, obscures, makes things unclear and opaque. The immediacy of art is an encounter with the surface and form which themselves are the concept and as such can provoke sensations that linger enigmatically with viewers and open up unexpected lines of association. I don’t expect art to hold people accountable or explain with clarity and transparency how political realities work. Just the opposite: as I hinted from the beginning, art is an interruption. 

In documentary, these details you mention – the gestures and other surface elements – work as background to authenticate any rational description precisely insofar as they escape any relevant explanatory declaration. To put it bluntly, we can trust the document as authentic evidence as the photograph gives us what we’re looking for but also more than that. The image is not just the servant of a narrative. The second point for me is that these details at the same time supply the materials of enjoyment in the peripheral focus. The enjoyment relates to feeling a fit of synchronization (in both senses of the word «fit») with the narration. We enjoy the fit of image and text but such irrelevant details make the enjoyment exceed itself while the synchronized fit holds back the absurdity within every image and every text. When brought to the foreground, these irrelevant details can take on new life, can expose the gap at the core of every synchronization, and provoke laughter at their absurdity, a laughter that is utterly useless from a direct political perspective. From an indirect perspective, that’s another matter and the outcome of excess is radically contingent, by definition unpredictable. The tricky thing, from an artistic standpoint, arises when the act of foregrounding such irrelevant performative details begins to function as mere transgression, as domesticated mockery. As such, they can end in some conclusion attributable completely to the art as a political or even artistic statement. This risk is always at play but with a little luck some enigma – along with the openness that accompanies it – lingers.

Audience member:
AI poses a hitch in this perspective on photographic evidence.

PF:
Yes, that’s another long, important discussion.

Moderator:
I think we have time for one more question or comment. 

Audience member:
So you’re not seeking a political outcome in the current circumstances. 

PF:
Specific political associations obviously animate the installations. These are thematically urgent, and I seek to participate in the politics of the moment. But, as I tried to describe here, I maintain a distinction between art and politics as modes of address and expression. If the work has a desired political effect, it lies in the specific failures to deliver expected forms and in a related capacity to open another path for conceptualizing the «current moment» in its inherent asynchrony.