Since the occupation of the US Embassy in Iran in 1979, both countries have severed diplomatic ties. For the past four decades, the building of the former Iranian Embassy and the ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC have been vacant. Legally and symbolically in a liminal state, the former embassy may not be rented or occupied while the US sanctions on Iran prevent the US government or persons from investing funds in the restoration of a property belonging to a country under embargo. Spanning historical and architectural research, law, autobiography, and film, this project reconstitutes the shuttered embassy from disjunctive fragments of photographs, objects, text, architectural debris, and speculation to collapse the dichotomies of inside and out, interior and exterior. In the absence and impossibility of an archive, the embassy will be recreated spatially, spectrally, and ephemerally within the context of increasingly hostile relations between Iran and the US.

Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist who, in 2009, was transplanted from street protests in a city of four seasons to the windowless rooms of the University of Southern California where aesthetics and politics were discussed in endless summers. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Eyebeam, New Museum, Queens Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Human Resources, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), LAXART, Los Angeles; Articule, Montreal; Beursschouwburg, Brussels; and Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland. Her words have appeared and are forthcoming in contemptorary (cofounding editor), The Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, X-TRA, Art Practical, The Enemy, The LA Review of Books, Ajam Media Collective, and MARCH, amongst others. She was the recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Art Matters Award, and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.