Rouzbeh Shadpey’s work explores anti-colonial pathophysiologies of illness and weariness, with a focus on the aesthetics and poetics of diagnosis. Interested in how concepts of health and illness are structured by scientific racism, language, and debilitative experience, he reassembles medical concepts across artistic, academic, scientific, and literary registers of knowledge in order to reinvest these with poetic potential and political valence.

Forgetting is the Sun seeks to restore dignity to the act of forgetting. The video essay juxtaposes footage of the artist’s grandmother silently counting her tespih while being administered a medical memory test with borrowed footage from two essay films that challenge state-sanctioned regimes of remembering: the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), and the Moroccan poet, filmmaker, and writer Ahmed Bouanani’s Mémoire 14 (1967). Weaving together the falsely dichotomized registers of biological memory and collective history, Forgetting is the Sun recontextualizes Farrokhzad and Bouanani’s defiance of state-sanctioned remembrance through the lens of individual forgetting—and its resistance to medical capture.