‘Statelessness as Practice’ is based on a fundamental question: would Sohrab Shahid Saless see his work succeed or fail in the cultural landscape of media, galleries and commentary today? By exploring ways in which contemporary practitioners have situated themselves in and against the lived reality and ideas of statelessness and displacement, and how the reception of such constructions by the art world and cultural society has developed since Shahid Saless's time, this chapter offers a new perspective for contemporary debate of archive, moving image and curatorial practice. Considering the cultural gap between the audiences that Shahid Saless found in Germany and his own heritage, this essay suggests possible motifs in some of the major trends in curatorial practice over the last decade that have led to the foregrounding of statelessness in public displays such as screenings and exhibitions. Bringing these ideas together, this chapter concludes by considering how curatorial strategies play out against the creative production considering a constant need for ‘new’, or the ongoing activity of national or regional promoters. The text looks at some developments in distribution channels such as galleries and digital platforms that were not available to Shahid Saless.

SHAHID SALESS's HISTORY

In the early 1970s, Sohrab Shahid Saless was internationally recognised as a pioneer of a new wave of Iranian cinema. However, as a filmmaker who had joined the ranks of the European filmmaking avant-garde, he turned his attention to German society, producing films that focused on the lives of outsiders and outcasts. The 1976 Time of Maturity (Reifezeit), the story of a boy coming of age next to his prostitute mother, marks a turning point in the young director's ascendant career.

A desire for mainstream success would hardly mark Shahid Saless out, were he a German-born filmmaker. By the early 1980s, even a number of the signatories of the radical 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto were beginning to enjoy international recognition, with the likes of Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders eventually establishing Hollywood practices. In a sense perhaps best symbolised by the phrase Film ist Kultur - which could well have attracted a capital K even without German orthographic rules - the German cinematic avant-garde became the mainstream.