This practice-based doctoral project examines the formation of a counter-visuality through underground amateur video practices in post-revolutionary Iran. In an environment where state’s visual system has reshaped the public visual culture and enforced a sanitized, heteronormative representation of bodies and gender roles, privately produced amateur videos—fragmented, glitch-ridden, and haptically rich—emerged as a critical space of resistance.

The research focuses on the specific bootleg aesthetics and haptic visuality of these underground archives, shaped by low-grade recording technologies (VHS, VCD) and intensified by successive acts of copying, transforming, and circulation. Here, visual "errors" such as glitches, noise, and distortions are not technical flaws but fundamental aesthetic and political markers that defy the flat, polished imagery of official state media.

The artistic component of the dissertation materializes as a video installation, based on a personal archive of amateur home videos and underground recordings. These fragmented amateur images, juxtaposed with the visual codes of Iranian State TV, create an experiential landscape where the viewer navigates between presence and absence, visibility and suppression. The installation experiments with the tension between the bootleg aesthetic and the state’s aesthetic grammar, proposing a hybrid visual narrative that reclaims suppressed memories and bodies.

By investigating the materiality of media formats and the affective power of poor images, the project contributes to debates in visual culture, gender politics, and media archaeology, offering new insights into subaltern modes of seeing, narrating, and resisting.
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Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Olga Moskatova