Erased Images of a Work About Historical Erasure deals with erased parts of Bita Razavi’s installation currently displayed at the Estonian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.

“This series of archival photographs of destroyed landscapes in Dutch East Indies document conditions of colonial extraction of labor and soil due to overexploitation of natural resources. These images were supposed to be the central part of my kinetic sculpture called Kratt-Diabolo Nº 3 displayed at the Estonian pavilion. But they were removed from my installation without my consent resulting in the exhibition of an incomplete work.”

 By presenting the erased images of her installation in a traveling exhibition starting from her hometown Tehran, Razavi attempts to shed light on the complexities that emerge when European colonial history is narrated solely from the European perspective and in the European context and the tendency to erase or highlight specific aspects. Razavi aims to address the existing power structures in the art world which enables such erasures and argues that these structures are comparable to the ones addressed and criticized by the art world.