Unlimited History

The title of Ramesch Daha’s longterm project, Unlimited History, is suggestive of an all encompassing narrative of world history, yet it is a work of détournement, made “possible by the capacity of devaluation,” as written by the artist Asger Jorn. Further on he states “there remain only two possibilities for us in Europe: to be sacrificed or to sacrifice. It is up to you to choose between the historical monument and the act that merits it.”
The process, which allowed Daha to originally negotiate her archival research within the unruliness of a journal, was embellished by the ephemeral rubbings of key archival documents and the online solitude of purchasing discarded photographs and documents. The research provided a complicated ground for realising her spatial paintings and video and sonic intermedia works. The interpretive structure for much, if not the entirety, remains the re-figuration of the geopolitical, embedded in the re-examination of their historical governance; a biographical and imagined contemplation between mitteleuropa and the Persian peninsula, the back and forth corresponding to a train timetable with a distant sense of the remaining force between two territories - the place where she now lives, Austria and the place of her ancestors, Persia, now the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Unlimited History for the artist has become Unlimited Histories of individual challenges and political mysteries in the sediments of ‘facts’. Here reversals of fortune, turmoil and dystopian visions gather in a different place of settling, a place where strangers and strangeness occupy multiple realities, the cosmos freed from the hands of abjection where nothing remains straightforward or clear, of disavowed memories and the remains of subjectivities. Welcome to the impossible dark of limited to the Unlimited and to History as a process. (Shaheen Merali)