In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.

In this transcription from the Forum, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Marina Fokidis, and Tirdad Zolghadr talk about how crucial the 1970s have been to the formation of today's landscape, both culturally and politically, from Latin America, to the Middle East, via Greece.

Omar: Hello everyone. I would like to give an introduction. One of the hypotheses that informed the imagined timeline that we have constructed for this year's Global Art Forum is one about how crucial the 1970s have been to the formation of today's landscape, both culturally and politically. In previous sessions, yesterday and also last weekend in Doha, we explored, for instance, Doha's spaceship architecture of the 70s and Dubai's urban planning of the 70s. Today's session will take us to other geographies and expand this exploration of the 70s and take us in particular to Chile, Iran and Greece. This session will be hosted by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera. He was here at the Global Art Forum last year and he was writing a book, and he had just lost two chapters of the book, and there was something of a panicky moment going on there. Since then the book has been published to great acclaim and it's called Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende 11 September 1973. This book in particular has been one of those entry points for us into this exploration of the 70s as an important decade. He is joined by Marina Fokidis from Greece, who is an independent curator and writer. She curated the Greek Pavilion at the latest Venice Biennial. She also curated the Third Thessaloniki Biennial in 2011, and she is the founder and artistic director of Kunsthalle Athena. We also have Tirdad Zolghadr with us. He is also a curator. As a curator he has worked in many different places, here in Dubai, Sharjah, Tehran, New York, and elsewhere. This year, he is leading the 'Form Fellows' programme as part of the Global Art Forum and of Art Dubai, and he is also a writer and a novelist in particular. The title of his upcoming novel is Headbanger but I do not know if it has anything to do with the 70s at all.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera: Excellent. It's an absolute pleasure to be back here, but the first thing that I have to do is congratulate you – you are the strong ones, you are the ones who endured Shumon's version of a marathon/TV talk show till the very end. As you will see, you will be given the best part of the show in the day. But also, you must be incredibly tired, because you have been sitting without a back support, many of you for quite some time. So let me channel my inner Latin American persona and invite you to stand up. Come on, stand up. Don't worry, I'm not going to teach you to do salsa, I'll do that afterwards. What I want to do though is to perform a little experiment, just a little visual experiment that I have performed before in Portugal, Brazil and other places, which is accompanied by version very minimalistic version of a bunch of visuals I am going to show you in the next five to seven minutes. And in a way, these will be our declaration about what history is, or as I would prefer, what history should not be. This is an experiment on why we should forget History, capital 'H', that is to say monumental history. Now what I want you to do is to draw a line with your index finger, just like that, extend your right hand and your arm infront of your chest. That's brilliant. Now go like that (points thumb upwards), exactly, you do not have to kill anyone, don't worry. But now I want you to do what Arab navigators of the fifteenth century and Hollywood directors of the twenty-first century do (creates a frame using his index fingers and thumbs). And now, zoom in, you see what happens. When you do this, the roundness of the Earth, that is to say, the roundness of space and time, remember your Einstein, becomes flattened, projected onto a bi-dimensional screen which you just made with your fingers.

This is what we think was the optimal trick that the Arab navigators used in order to navigate in the open seas. It was taken up by Italian painters in the sixteenth century, particularly Paolo Uccello, who very quickly noted that if you flattened the surface you produce the line of the horizon. Uccello copied Arab navigators and used their invention to invent what, in modern art, is known as 'perspectiva', perspective. But, of course, the line of the horizon drawn in this manner also means that you can divide the circumference of the Earth, yes go ahead, into two: North and South. You also have the inside, those of us on this side of the dividing line and those over there on the other side of the dividing line. When you create an inside and an outside, you invent another very important thing for modern times, both in art and in philosophy. You invent identity. Those of us on this side of the line are 'us' – a kinship, we can recognize one another. This is what they were talking about in the previous talk – those on the other side, kafir, barbarians, those who we cannot recognize. Us and them. OK, you can sit down.

That very basic dualism has defined the way in which most of history is written or narrativized. Notice that in most historical books, those that write history with a capital 'H', the kinds of books that you find there, the kinds of books that you should not read, although actually, I would make an exception for two books over there. One is a really brilliant book that is, you can see, on the first line, the second from left to right, yes. And the one behind it, William's Return of the King – brilliant books, you should read them. All the others, forget about them, all the others are history with a capital 'H', which is always inevitably written with a linear chronological framework. And that chronological framework also means that you will always find in those histories, us and them. And us, inevitably, are the good guys. Them, the bad guys. And of course, history, then, is flattened, and it becomes something very simple. How us, the good ones, can triumph at the end of history, by which we mean to either have them convert to our values, or go somewhere else, or else, sorry, they might face extinction. Those two basic dualisms are what mark most of our understandings of history. And you see them pretty much everywhere these days, because we also have interiorized them as Pankaj Mishra did this morning in the Gulf News while referring to the return of the Eurasian fantasy – all the stuff that is happening in Crimea – he referred to how a friend of his in Germany described the situation with this phrase: 'Well, you see, the Russians, they might need another century to become Europeans'. The idea, of course, is that because they are over there, they will take some time to walk along the line of history, which some of us have already walked, who have already entered what some might call the 'Promised Land', which in Economical language is the developed countries that supposedly show all the other countries an image of their own future. But that understanding has been challenged from the very outset, particularly in the 1970s. There we go. By those guys and those ladies. Notice, terribly, that the lady is at the back. It's a shame, because in my book she is the protagonist, she is in between Salvador Allende and Jose Marti, here on the left hand side of the image. Her name is Blanca Luz Brum, she was an Uruguyan poet, she was an incredible woman, born to escape. When she was 17 years of age, she escaped on a motorbike with a Peruvian poet and ended up in Peru. Over there she launched a journal with Jose Carlos Mariategui, who attended the Second Comintern with M.N. Roy and Sultan Galiev. He is also among those responsible for the emergence of another understanding of history, which Okwui just invoked while talking to Hans Ulrich about the crucial importance of the Bandung Conference, and of the emergence of the voice of the Third World in the 1970s.

When history is written in a linear manner and with a basic dualism the third term is always excluded and is always forgotten. Those guys are forgotten. The Bandung Conference is forgotten. The people in Colombia forget where the term kafir comes from. And that is when history, minor history with a small 'h', becomes much more interesting. That's Paolo Uccello; there you see the line of the horizon which gives you history in the stages, as if it were an evolution, the very idea of progress. And there, another protagonist of my Story of Death Foretold in Chile 1973, Salvador Allende, a well-known figure, but in this particular photograph, he is wearing the colours of another kind of narrative, another bunch of symbols. The symbols of Arkana mystery. A Chilean poet and cinematographer at the time, Alejandro Jodorowsky, is someone who both Shumon and I like very much – he makes really good films and used to take really great drugs. I didnot say that. He took all that imagery and produced a very different narrative taking place after the events of 11 September 1973, when the good guys decided that the bad guys (that is to say Allende and the voices of the Third World in Chile) should be obliterated. They did exactly that with the help of some Hawker Hunter jets from the British like the one you see in the photograph, which brought to Chile that very recognizable figure of the Arkana, reinterpreted by Jodorowsky. What is history? Hans Ulrich, in one of these wonderful Serpentine Gallery marathons (the one that I liked the most of all) invited my favourite writers China Mieville and Evan Calder Williams to describe their understanding of history. And China and Evan invoked the image of Paul Klee's Angel of History (1920) as reinterpreted by the philosopher of history, Walter Benjamin. History with a capital 'H', the history that I have just described as a flattening of time and space, turns out to be nothing more than an optical illusion. What it erases is the fact that history is a piling of wreckage before the feet of an anguished angel, a pile of debris flying skywards. It so happens that, nowadays, we cannot see history from the perspective of the angel. Rather, as the visual theorist Hito Steyerl puts it: 'We're no longer staring at the wreckage from the point of view of Benjamin's shell-shocked angel. We are the debris'. History, as written and told from the perspective of us as debris is what we, in this panel, would like to introduce and perhaps, just as we persuaded you to stand up and play a little bit with us, we can also persuade you to go and read, write, portray, and make that other kind of history – minor history. Let me invite my first speaker to my left, Marina, to tell us her version of this history in relation to the events that took place in the short 1970s in Greece.

Marina Fokidis: Thank you very much. Well, it's very hard to follow you because you created a wonderful history, a minor history narrative, but Iwill try my best. In my case you will see a little bit of real events that happened in Greece in the short 70s that start in the 40s as we will see from the presentation. And just to thank Shumon and everybody for having me here. Not so much for speaking about Greece, because I am happy to be squeezed between the two divas here, and as we are discussing before, Greece is always 'squeezed'. But mostly for hearing all these things, this one day and a half that made me think of our Western assumptions of other places that are not under this Western dominant thought. I do not know if you have heard this but by being Greek right now it's like being the irresponsible people of Europe, we are the non-reliable corner of European Union.

Oscar: You're kafir!

Marina: That's right, exactly. It's funny because we created a little bit of attention of contemporary artists. But thinking about that it's very funny, how they deal with it. Like some months ago, a very well-known artist came to give a talk in Greece, and it's very funny to see how these artists make a museum career out of appropriating exotic realities for themselves, while being somewhere else. So, once she arrived in Greece, the first thing you saw on her Facebook was: 'Hey guys, for you those of you in Greece, or for Greeks, is there any interesting riots that I could attend?' Before people would ask is there were any other interesting galleries that I could go to – it's bordering on vulgarity. So I understand very much this sort of assumption that can exist. I said in the previous slide something like history is nostalgia, such as Greeks will always like to bring up Greek words. So nostalgia is the pain "algos" for "nostos" which is remembering. It was invented in the seventeenth century as a type of pathology, as it was observed initially within Swiss mercenaries after long hours in military duty. Effects included melancholy, depression, anorexia and eventually suicide. Today, nostalgia is a universal emotion. Rapid socio-economic and technological transformation makes one feel foreign to their own world. We grow up in a world or we come into a world, but we do not recognize it while we are growing up because things are changing so fast. So homecoming is the quest, but my question is what kind of homecoming is this? Is it a homecoming to a dysfunctional family, to destructiveness? Is there an alternative, somewhere else to go?

For the sake of this retro-mania, I'm going to do a very quick sprint through several images of artists and of ephemera about Greece. This is by no means a historical description of the Left or the Right or of Greece. I'm not a historian and these are just some loose images, somehow summarizing art and politics as performances of different regimes. The image we have right now is by an artist called Sotiris Sorogas in the 70s. It was a triptych and although it was done in the 70s, it depicts symbolically a character that was called Balayanis who used to always have a carnation on his jacket. And so this character, Balayanis, was killed in the civil wars, he was accused and sentenced to death for being a Communist despite the help of his intellectual friends from all over the world including Picasso and Charlie Chaplin. So then the red carnation was adopted by the Left as a symbol of freedom. Also, this image refers to the Rebetiko music players, due to the exchange of population because this was in the 20s when Greeks had to leave Turkey as an effect of the Lausanne Treaty and come to Greece. Meanwhile in Greek history, Greece is a very quiet and beautiful place, as some of you might have experienced. I grew up in a very protected environment, in a residential area, going to a good school. Everything was calm there and beautiful, but we always knew and I always felt that something was wrong. Then the stories began unfolding in front of me and I heard about my Dad who was sentenced to death (but finally he served ten years in prison for being a Communist). The only thing I knew was that he left his university to fight for freedom with the allies in Libya, or that my grandparents were in constant mourning because they had to leave Turkey in the 30s and come to Greece as a result of this population exchange. I also noticed the change of our history books in school, which happened maybe four times whilst I was at school, and each book would cancel what the previous history book was saying. And also, I was brought up with the fables of Aesop, an ancient Greek folk philosopher, and Nastratin Hogea who is like a satirical Sufi from Turkey, although Turkey was our enemy.

The images you see now are the freedom fighters during the Civil War. The Civil War happened in Greece between 1944 and 1949'. It happened just after the Second World War when Greece was completely wrecked economically and socially but we kept fighting each other, the Left and the Right. The Left completely adopted communism although it was irrelevant for the Greek reality. At the same time, the Marshall Plan was helping Greece and one of the things they did was to give radios to those in rural areas so they could hear what was happening in their villages, where there were so many dead people, Greeks killing Greeks all these years. Here we have a wooden engraving by an artist in 1949. What you see is a very vulgar Greek gesture, but also a very common one – it means 'to your face', which means you are completely dumb. We still do it in the car, but it's very strong, it's an anathema. This engraving is an outsider, it's a result of the war, to both of them because nobody could take a position between the Fascists and the Communists. At the same time, we have Glezos and Santas, two students that in 1941, who risked their lives to go up and take down the flag of the Nazis from Parthenon. Here, I have to say that Michel Serres, in one of his last books, called Temps de Crises, the time of crisis. He argues that the most important division that we can do right now is between the soft and the hard gestures, between the soft and the hard revolutions, and this is an important division to be made. He also argues that writing, typography, reproduction, and the computer in our days, have created a lot of turbulence and have shaken conventions, as much as hard changes have, like industry and nuclear bombs and so on. He thinks that the way to democracy is the access and the active intervention, as simple as that. And we all know how we can have access and the active intervention and somehow create our own fates through that. So I'm showing you some hard and soft gestures.

The next slide is the same two men, after some years, in front of Parthenon. The man on the right, who was Glezos, became a deputy in several political parties and had a brilliant political career. Here in 1944, we have a sort of outsider poet called Georgios Makris. He was one of those who were called a 'saboteur of antiquity' in that period of Greek history when national identity was very important. He made a proclamation about the bombing of the Parthenon. It was a very strong gesture, never written in a history book at that period of time, and he didnot actually follow a political career, but he committed suicide later on like many Greek intellectuals. This is a performance of existentialism in Greece. Following from the 50s we were under a democracy but we still had a very conservative way of being and behaving and very conservative politics. So in that hut, which is the hut of a shoemaker called Simos who also became a tentmaker for balconies, the Greek existentialism started to exist. This is the start, in a way, of the first art centre in Greece, or the first Kunsthalle, and what people did there was to gather, dance, make art. But three years later they closed this because the police confiscated some love letters written to one another and they thought that this kind of free love is completely illegal and very dangerous. Simos then, photographed himself again in front of the Parthenon and decided to leave in his car, to live in Paris. In the 50s around the same time, we have what they call the 'Teddy Boys public assault', and this was youth who found another soft gesture of revolution which was to throw yoghurt at whatever they thought was unjust and not of their own opinion. For example, they would throw yoghurt at American cars or at organizations that mistreated women or to everything they thought was not quite good. So it was like the 'yoghurt war', have you heard of the Greek yoghurt? We have a lot, you know. And it's very funny because in Germany there is a yoghurt brand called the Hellinas, which means Greek and I think these youths would have been very happy to have that in their hands. The police then decided what to do with these public assaults; they would take these youths, cut their hair, like that haircut you see there, in public, in the streets. And make them wear a tag that says 'I'm sorry, I disobeyed, I'm a Teddy Boy'.

At the same time in the beginning of 60s, we had the first union of Russell in Greece, and they were trying to organize a walk for peace. We were under democracy again but the walk of peace could not happen because the police blocked the people. You were not allowed in democratic Greece to do a walk of peace. The idea was that they would start from the centre of Athens, and they would go to Marathónas, where there is a monument of victory. One man, Gregorios Lambrakis, who was a deputy at that time, found a way. He went through all the blockades in his car with his wife, because he had asylum as a politician, so they could not stop him really. And when he arrived near the monument that was the meeting point for the end, he stepped out of the car and he had this banner that said 'Greece' with a peace sign. Of course, they arrested him, but they could not really put him in jail because he was a politician. So what they do is put him in this jail car going around for two days because he could not be arrested on Greek ground. Three months after that he died mysteriously, and the international organization of students with Russell went to his funeral. We are approaching the 70s or rather the late 60s. This is two days before the coup d'état we had in Greece, which was between 1967 and 1974 and this is a sort of funny incident. Am I okay with time or not? Okay, so there was a Rolling Stones concert where there was the carnation at the very beginning. So in that concert, the youth were giving Mick Jagger a bouquet of red carnations. Mick Jagger was throwing them back to the audience and then immediately everybody was arrested, Mick Jagger included, and being beaten because the police said this was an action of Communism. Coup d'etat – here is a design of the colonel, the Greek people under him, the imperialists, and the Marvel comics Superman caricature is the Left (refers to image). Then after that we have several performances, like these are festivities of the Junta, these are students occupying universities, writing the word freedom, until we arrive to the incident of the three days occupation of the universities when, unfortunately, the military Junta sent a tank and killed people. This is the kind of art that was produced during that time, I will not go into details about it because I do not have that much time, but you can see the carnations. This is Vlassis Caniaris, he died and you can see the carnation being brought back. Artists were trying to get over censorship at that time.

We have another artist, Yorgos Lazogas, that just saw this gas stove which is very common in Greece because we use it to make Greek coffee. So it went through the police censorship, they were not that clever, but it's also the bomb that the rioters use. This is a puppet theatre, the theatre of Hitler as it was called. And we come to the end, to this sort of funny incident, to a different kind of narrative of revolution, one that I think is very significant but it was not discussed so much in Greece. In this film from 1969 you can see the Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos who was the chief of the coup d'état. He decided to do a youth festival, because he thought that that was the way to convince people about his coup d'état. Of course, it was not so hard to do and or to have a lot of people around him because, of course, they went to all the villages and they forced people to come to this festivity, so everybody was there and everything was going fine. He was giving his speeches until the last minute, the crowds of youth started to laugh frantically. It was really crazy! They started to laugh so hard that he could not really continue speaking. This was the really the first real and significant protest against the coup d'état and from there it was understood that it would end badly. It was maybe not something that was pre-agreed but when the crowd started laughing, then everyone understood.

Tirdad Zolghadr: Thank you, Marina. Thanks Oscar and Omar for the introductions and Shumon for the invitation. I have worked on and off in Tehran since the late 90s, which is why Shumon suggested I speak about the 70s from a Tehran perspective and I tried to summarize two angles that I thought would be the most interesting to this conversation here. One being the violent plight of the Iranian Left, because I knew that this was research that both Marina and Oscar are pursuing in other contexts. But also, the foundation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in the mid-70s in Tehran, which is research that I have been looking into for a while, that I have presented in other contexts and that I'll be really condensing into a very brief presentation today. In some ways those two histories are related, in some ways not.

So, to situate my own background in Tehran, that slide is basically an advertisement for our family restaurant in the 70s, which is kind of endearing but it's a mark of pride. And the Zolghadr family was neither particularly wealthy nor particularly monarchist, but with their eccentric cosmopolitan lifestyle that gravitated around this restaurant, they definitely did profit from the razzmatazz of the Shah's 1970s and they were not complaining. Very recently, I met a regular patron of this restaurant. I found out by coincidence that he frequented the place, and we can call him Golmohamad. He was a member of a Maoist faction in the 70s and he told me that he actually spent many nights trying very hard to get as drunk as possible at our family establishment. Not for the fun of it, but because many of his comrades had opted for armed resistance and were being picked off and shot one by one as they were pursuing an armed struggle in the forests of Northern Iran. And he had backed out and he was finding it very hard to deal with the guilt of survival. He told me a lot of colourful anecdotes, some of which were familiar, some not, about various factions. For example, the Islamic Marxists were pushing for more guns and less theory, the Trotskyists for less guns and more theory, the Maoists for more guns and more theory, many Social Democrats and Stalinists alike for less guns and less theory both, and so on and so forth. And the factionalism was one of the reasons for the demise of the Left, but it was not the only reason. The other was a systematic campaign of persecution on behalf of the Shah's regime, which led to many arrests and executions over the course of the 1970s and had a continuation after the revolution and culminated in the physical annihilation of the Iranian Left in the late 1980s during a famous blood bath in early 1989. Obviously, this is part of a wider pattern that unfolded in many other places and sometimes it's tempting to speculate what the world would look like if this physical annihilation of the most dedicated Leftist activists had not occurred. The Shah and his wife had an ambitious cultural agenda too.

It was the early 1970s when Empress Farah took an interest in art and announced the need for a public art museum. She took an interest in a slump in art market prices in the world and invested very swiftly in scores of weathered New York galleries and saved them from bankruptcy. And her collection quickly grew to include a spectacular range of Western canon Meisterwerke, which are now, according to the Guardian newspaper, worth nearly US$4 billion. The 5,000 square metre museum was inaugurated in the summer of 1977 with a solo show by David Hockney. The architecture was both elegant and bewildering; it consisted of these poly-circular trajectories that sometimes lead underground, sometimes into these foyers, sometimes offering views of the spectacular 7,000 square metre park. And in a style that is characteristic of the time, the edifice combines stark modernist architecture with localist elements and flair. It's interesting to note that back in the 70s, this museum (which is widely called 'Musee') was in a similar situation to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi today, in the sense that it was scrambling to piece together a collection at breakneck speed, which means that artists at the time would have had leverage. This is what allows the Gulf labour campaign today to be so vocal. Given that the Guggenheim needs the art and needs it now, the artists have a bargaining chip to deal with. However, you would be hard pressed to find someone in visual art who had any qualms or reservations about working with the Persian monarchy. I did hear a rumour, it was only a rumour, that Lawrence Weiner had refused his invitation at the time, and at the first occasion, I did ask him if this was true. Weiner testily replied that he was 70 years old and didn't have the time to stand around and congratulate himself for his political credentials. I assume that was a yes. What is the museum today, 37 years later? You see collection shows, you see exhibitions of everything from calligraphy, to landscapes, to portraits by local artists that are fairly traditional and professional in temperament. You also see curatorial scandals at every turn, a clunky glass wall separating you from the art, a soundtrack of classical concertos, jarring juxtapositions of artworks, and so on and so forth. It's most widely known as a collection of modern art in a striking example of modernist architecture, but as the institutional epithet makes clear, it is devoted to the contemporary specifically, 'Musee Honarhaye Moaser'. Even if it is a definition of the contemporary that strays from the trans-continental consensus of what contemporary means, as in contemporary art, it seems that the 'Musee' is not uninterested in a trans-continental conversation, but it's also not in a hurry. It seems to insist on a conversation on its own terms.

The contemporary to us, and I use this term very deliberately, is a certain mode of open-ended flux and exchange and inter-connectivity of boundaries melting into air. So in the eyes of people who use terms like contemporary in the way that I do, the 'Musee' is a frustrating self-provincializing stick in the mud, a form of refusal. To be sure, the art world routinely celebrates refusals of all kinds. Every other art fair has panel discussions commending refusals. But the refusal at play in the 'Musee' is impossible to fit into an agenda such as Art Dubai's or Frieze's or any other epicentre of the contemporary art field. Today, I would say that every curator who flies into Tehran and walks into the place, including myself, fantasizes very fantastically about being the Empress of this 'Musee'. Oh the things you could do, the bittersweet spleen of what may have been and never will be. Do the Iranians a favour and interconnect. Somebody call Shumon. But given what museums currently aspire to, I am wondering whether the 'Musee' really is a curatorial disaster zone. I cannot think of any museum experience that is more distinctive, more pedagogical, and more haunting, than the 'Musee'. It is even used as a social hangout and is widely referred to as an emblematic allegorical tale of Iran at large. So it does everything that you wish a museum would do for you. It's the strongest kind of refusal because it doesn't need you, it doesn't particularly care. It's also a refusal in historical terms, to return to the premise of today. It's indeed hard to find any traces whatsoever of the history I've been summarizing for you; neither the international hubris of contemporary art nor the political violence that it overshadowed in the mid 70s. In this way, it's a monument to the discontinuity of history, if you will. In other words, you can link the political violence of the 70s to the foundation of art in any way you like. You can talk fig leaves, epistemological thresholds, archive fever, what have you. The 'Musee' has other fish to fry. It's funny that this kind of discontinuity is actually unfamiliar and rare to us in contemporary art. After all, we like to talk discontinuity; we have all read our Foucault. But I sometimes wonder whether discontinuity, when it's uttered in our field, is another way of simply saying something complicated, indeterminate, circuitous, ultimately beyond borders, which is to say, actually quite continuous in a way. The orthodox position in contemporary art is that history is indeed non-linear, infinitely complex, and inherently indeterminate on most levels, if not all. And this is indeed the mirror image of the idea of the contemporary I was talking about, which is in turn indeterminate and infinitely complex, and so on. This has led to the fact that we have an intuitive take on history, making it a catachresis, which means it's a metaphor that is not recognized as a metaphor. It's so deeply institutionalized that it feels like it's the real thing. It feels like epistemic home cooking. So to respond to the quote by Hito Steyerl, I very much identify myself with the project of seeing myself as part of the debris of history, it comes intuitively to me. It comes, actually, a little too intuitively for me.

The thing that I'm trying to grapple with is what happens when that notion of history within the contemporary art field – contrary to what may be in certain history departments, art history departments, journalism, and so on – becomes hegemonic. In a context like this, I think focusing on a decade like the 70s, as Shumon has proposed, can be helpful in a Bertolt Brechtian-plump-thought kind of way. Because decades are unapologetically metaphorical. They are in your face and they annoy and irritate in a way that spatial abstractions do not. Somebody's always very quick to disagree with you as soon as you offer an abstraction in time, as opposed to abstractions in space which tend to go down pretty well. So, to use Shumon's favourite term, they are polemical, and I'll end on that.

Oscar: That's probably the perfect point to enter now, because it allows us to begin a short discussion. What I find most interesting about Hito Steyerl's use of both Benjamin and Adorno is that it ends precisely where you ended. Steyerl ends up telling us that if we want to produce off or on concepts, which may be of worth in our Post-Modern time, then we should go over to the side of objects, a 'form perdue' is the phrase that she uses. She's harking back that reference to Adorno, to this very idea that, actually, we may be mistaken in thinking that history is a sort of umbrella or over-narrative where we can cram all sorts of events just as when we think that space is a background where things happen. It's not what space is, you put it very correctly when you said, actually, the 'Musee', the space, could not care less about you. That is more relevant to us nowadays, because, I am sure you have noticed, we have ceased to be important as biological and historical beings. We are now geological actors and what we are doing now is producing climate change and all of these things, a level of time that is spatial, natural, geological. It has nothing to do with what we can do individually, refusal or not. This is a question to both of you – maybe what we are witnessing is precisely the emergence of a history that goes beyond the nature-culture divide and therefore also an art that has nothing to do with culture, or cultures in plural.

Tirdad: I would have to think about that last part, that last part caught me by surprise. But what I could say in response is that yes, that sounds promising and I think it reminds us of the fact that within contemporary art, we would actually be in a really favourable position to think about history in a way that both goes beyond what that generation of thinkers that we have been quoting have tried to pull apart – these very traditionalist notions of history – and yet not to kick back and relax on those achievements and to think of history as this comfortable and cataclysmic notion of non-linearity. Rather than objects, I'm more fascinated by institutions in this respect. I think that the Documenta conversation earlier today was actually really emblematic in that way, because it's very rare for three, or four curators to sit in a room, and think about history as diligently as that – it is very rare. I also blame myself, it just does not happen much. There is this ingrained amnesia which is very much informed by a particular post-structuralist approach or an interpretation of a post-structuralist take on history. And then also by a professional survival instinct that kind of tells you that you better react against what is happening before you because what is coming after you will certainly not give a damn about you. There is no time to think about what came right before you, so there's this systematic, pragmatized amnesia that has become part of the curatorial profession. And then when you look at an institution like Documenta, suddenly it forces you to think in historical terms with a certain texture.

Marina: Well, there is not much to add to this. It was interesting to hear you say that, again in respect to Michel Serres, I would say he was saying in the same book that I quoted, something that when we talk today about the end of history, it does not have to do only with this loop event of too many histories, how many times we have talked about this? But also with the human genocide, which means that he thinks that it is so urgent to find an exodus because humans and the planet are dying very fast, and that is what we are facing right now. So it's very interesting...

Oscar: It would be very interesting to see how we begin to express those new challenges. New in the 'real' term. Again, I do not know if you have noticed but one of these badges that Shumon is distributing around, in fact the one that he has, says 'Meanwhile...Anthroposcene'.

Marina: Oh, I have not seen this.

Oscar: The reference behind that is the very idea, which is becoming very enticing to many geologists and physicists, that we have abandoned the previous geological era because we have become a geological agent. And in that scale, human history does not matter as much. But also, the individualism that we celebrate in everyday life also ceases to matter, because climate warming is a thoroughly collective phenomenon. It's not something that you can solve solely by switching off your light or, you know, becoming more conscious about your use of energy. It will have to involve an equally collective response, and so I wonder what you see in terms of emerging art or current art which might begin to express the different quality of those challenges, which go even beyond the human, in the sense, precisely what Michel Serres proposes in his Time of Crisis?

Tirdad: Yeah thanks, Marina. I do not think that there are proposals that could account for that level of complexity and that level of urgency, that picture which you are painting, and I see that among artists and curators alike. I think that it's because you used the term proposal and the nature of a proposal within contemporary art is something which right now is so heavily invested in something that I call indeterminacy. I'm drawing on theorists such as Suhail Malik, who has been using this term to describe contemporary art, which is so invested in in a ferocious insistence on not being didactic, not being something which could be even for a split second mistaken with a political message, let alone propaganda, because art takes an astounding measure of pride in its degrees of separation from all of those things. And I think that to go there, this place that you are describing, would take a whole other ball game.

Oscar: This is fantastic, that we end here today at this very point, because I think everybody noticed the fact that our admired curator friends, the one thing they did not speak of was the end of their proposed century, as a member of the audience pointed out. Part of the reason may be that the challenges that we now face do oblige us to find a very different language to the one that dominates, not only in art, but also intellectual life and history. Do you see that, for instance, the kinds of things that we could identify in the 70s, could in any way perhaps be useful tools for answering or at least tackling this very crucial challenge?

Marina: Well, as I said, I like this ritualistic repetition of history, which is coming out of vested speed or something else, but I do not see how it will be very useful. I just see that it will be useful to understand that we are repeating the same thing, where we are in a loop, we are avatars in some sort of a video game that is prescribed, not by somebody else, but rather it's a conspiracy theory prescribed by all of us but it does not lead to anything. But we keep playing until exhaustion, and maybe it's about time that we changed the rules. I do not know how.

Oscar: That's probably the perfect phrase to end up with.

Shumon: So, I find it fascinating that we end on the anthrophoscenic time, geological time, but here in planetary time, we have run out of it. So will you please join me in thanking Oscar, Marina, and a very ill Tirdad. He's been heroic, but thank you very much for not pulling out, thank you.