Shadi Harouni

Shadi Harouni’s practice engages with the history of erasure and resistance, most recently looking to the ties between commodified natural resources, such as stone and metal, and the distribution of political, symbolic, and emotional power. Her research often leads her to quarries and cemeteries, as she parses the mythologies surrounding deceased and hidden objects or contraband. The Lightest of Stones was shot in an isolated black mountain pumice quarry in Iranian Kurdistan. The men in the film, whose own work at the quarry has been rendered profitless by the trade sanctions against Iran, critique and empathize with the artist’s futile attempt to carve through the mountain by hand. In a political and economic atmosphere of anxiety and despair, they stand before the camera and talk about labor, ISIS, dragons, and Jennifer Lopez. Several of the older men in the group were jailed during the 1979 Iranian revolution due to their political allegiances, and fled to this remote region upon release. While they strive to remain out of sight of their own government, during Harouni’s film, the group also speaks to how they will be misunderstood by a Western audience, to whom they only see themselves represented in a negative light on television. Both the secluded location behind the mountain, and the positioning of the uncovered female artist with her back to the men, render the film set as a marginal space, a space for possibility, humor, and reflection in the Islamic Republic.