“Beyond Identity” – Rah Eleh on Hybridity, Queer Futurism and the Politics of Memory

Your work repeatedly presents identity as something performed rather than possessed. Why is that distinction important?

Rah Eleh: Because I understand gender, race and ethnicity as social constructs. Judith Butler famously describes gender as something we perform rather than simply are. The same logic can also be applied to race and ethnicity. We continually produce these identities through language, clothing, gestures and performance. Drag illustrates this beautifully. By exaggerating gender, drag exposes how constructed and performative it has always been. Ethnicity can function similarly, and through my characters Goldokht and Oreo, ethnicity is turned into farce, exposing its artifice while attempting to “pass” as authentic.

Another example is the the Western art world which often expects Iranian artists to perform a recognisable version of „Iranian-ness“, Persian carpets, caligraphy, hijabs, familiar cultural symbols. I’m interested in pushing those expectations and motifs until they become absurd. Once you exaggerate these images, they begin to reveal their own artificiality.

Humour plays an equally important role. Like performance itself, humour is reflexive. It allows you to critique systems by exaggerating them rather than simply rejecting them. That’s something I admire in queer aesthetics and camp more generally.

Many histories survive only in fragments or not at all. Queer histories, women’s histories and diasporic histories are often marked by absence. Saidiya Hartman introduced the idea of critical fabulation as a way of engaging with precisely those silences. Can artistic speculation become a legitimate way of working with these gaps?

Rah Eleh: Absolutely. Speculation allows us to imagine otherwise. It creates space for narratives that official archives never recorded or purposefully omitted. Whether we’re imagining another museum model, another political structure or another future altogether, speculation expands what becomes thinkable.

At the same time,artists must remain critical. We should ask ourselves who speculative work is for. Does it circulate only within the contemporary art circuit? Can it reach wider audiences? Can it shift public discourse? These questions should be considered.

But speculation has enormous potential because it allows us to revisit archives differently and intervene by inserting overlooked narratives and communities in these exclusionary spaces.

During my recent residency at Fondation Fiminco in Paris, I worked again at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, looking for images of queer women. Sometimes the material isn’t explicitly queer at all. One image shows two women dancing while holding hands. Historically it may simply depict a dance, but to me their gesturesuggested intimacy. Their hands and bodies mirrored together to create a vulva shape and as they gazed into each other’s eyes. Rather than asking whether that reading is historically „correct,“ I became interested in what the image could become. I transformed it into a Persian ornamental plate. These traditional plates usually contain geometric decorations, but I redesigned those patterns into a more minimal, futuristic language and placed the two women at the centre as a relief. Then I mounted the plate on a magnetic levitation device so that it hovers in space like a flying saucer.

The work is not about truthful representation per se; it offers a queer rereading of the archive. It asks what other possibilities might have existed, and what possibilities we might imagine today. For me, one of the most exciting things artistic practices can do is open up history.

That also seems connected to the way you think about heritage. Your work doesn’t simply preserve inherited traditions. It activates and transforms them. Is heritage something we inherit, or something we continually reinvent?

Rah Eleh: I would always choose reinvention. Heritage is a complicated concept for me because I don’t have just one heritage. I’m Iranian. I’m Canadian. I’m queer. I’m an activist. I’m someone who grew up in exile. All those experiences shape who I am.

A scholar once told me that in my work „everything is under scrutiny.“ I think that’s true. I approach heritage with the same criticality as I do ideas of authenticity or belonging. I’m much more interested in how these identities interlock and the hybridity they imbue than in a purist mono-heritage background.

Growing up in the diaspora taught me that identity isn’t singular; it’s layered, contradictory, and constantly shifting. Some people might argue that, because I grew up outside Iran, I should dedicate myself to preserving Iranian culture. Ironically, many Iranians who grew up in Iran would probably question my authority to do exactly that. I’ve not only made peace with the fact that I can’t please everyone, but I do question both the Western oriental gaze and the communities’ purist inclinations— both to me are problematic because they propagate an “us vs them” rhetoric.

Rather than trying to recover some authentic origin, I’m interested in radical unbelonging. It’s in these in-between spaces that I see the greatest creative and political potential. For me, radical unbelonging is a way of imagining futures that move beyond nationalism and authenticity. To radically unbelong is to exist outside binary logic, to inhabit the liminal threshold, embrace pluriversality and advocate for a postnational futurity. These are central to the proposal for Xenofuturism, which I have advanced in my own writing and artworks.

Finally, what are you working on now?

Rah Eleh: I’m continuing my research into queer archives and producing another large-scale sculpture. I’m still searching for the right image, so that project is very much in its research phase.

I am also a part of a group show at the Museum of Kunst and Gewerbe in Hamburg, where for the first time, I am working with textiles and Persian carpets. The group exhibition “HAMDELI – CARPETS TELL STORIES,” curated by Jasmin Holtkötter, runs until June 2027, and I have created a multimedia project by cutting a vulva shaped opening into a Persian carpet that reveals an infinity light portal.

When I return to Canada, I will begin developing a virtual reality project connected to Iran. Originally, I wanted to use VR to create a prototype that would allow exilic people to experience a country that has remained inaccessible to them. I imagined travelling through Iran with a 360-degree camera, visiting historical sites, riding in taxis, and attending parties, as a way to explore whether immersive technology could create a different kind of access to a place I cannot physically enter. Then the recent escalation of the conflict changed the course of the project. As heritage sites came under threat, the project shifted. Instead of documenting existing places, I’m now thinking about speculative reconstruction.

What would it mean to rebuild destroyed heritage sites inside a virtual environment? Could audiences actively participate in that reconstruction? And what would the ethics of such an experience be? These questions remain unresolved. I’m also very aware of the limitations of immersive technologies. I’ve experienced VR works that attempt to recreate war, and I often found myself frustrated. You can always remove the headset. You can never reproduce the reality of living through this extreme violence.

That makes me cautious, as I don’t want to aestheticize conflict or create the illusion that virtual immersion is equivalent to lived experience or exoticize these environments. But it’s a fine line to walk: how can diasporic artists shed light on injustices imposed by our governments in the host nation, reclaim or better understand their lost culture, and simultaneously implicate the audience through an aesthetic experience? This is a tall order and the guiding questions I am currently navigating.

Throughout our conversation, we’ve spoken about identity, archives, technology and futurity. What strikes me is that your work never seems interested in preserving fixed histories. Instead, it treats the past as something active, something we can question, reinterpret and carry into the future.

Rah Eleh: Exactly. For me, the past requires a critical rereading, and the present requires an active intervention to make a better future possible.