Long Ago and Not True Anyway, installation view, Waterside Contemporary. Slavs and Tatars, Self-Management Body, 2013; Silkscreen, cross-stitching, cotton; 6 x 28.5 x 5.5 cm. Slavs and Tatars, Triangulation (Not Kalingrad Not Kerbala), 2011; Concrete, paint. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Taking the exhibition’s thesis most directly, the collaborative group Slavs and Tatars claims a spurious (though not necessarily absurd) parallel between the Polish Solidarity movement Solidarność and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. This is history of the imagination, though it is not without purpose: the history of each movement is used as a means by which to understand the other, highlighting similarities where one may at first see culturally—and thus, perhaps, totally—separate events. In Self-Management Body (2013), a vaguely ominous statement of bureaucratic democracy appears silkscreened in both English and Polish across an Iranian pattern. Beside it, the low wedge-shaped sculpture Triangulation (Not Kaliningrad Not Kerbala) (2011) abstractly unites geography, through precise negation, by indicating a common point where the two cities are not. In both works, Slavs and Tatars composes work around cultural claims, drawing focus to the newly figured space between histories.

Mekitar Garabedian. MG, 2006 (still); Video; 2:05. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

The less imagined—though no less abstract—effects of movement between cultures are explored on a personal level in the work of Mekhitar Garabedian. In Garabedian’s short projected video MG (2006), the artist makes a tilted homage to the French New Wave film The 400 Blows (1959), performing the film’s powerful scene wherein the hero, Antoine Doinel, repeats his name into a bathroom mirror, again and again, as if to summon himself into being by will alone. Garabedian performs this same ritual, only here the artist alternates between two dialects, switching his pronunciation in turns, as if perpetually unsure which construction of self to summon. Behind this projection, twelve photographs hang in six frames, each displaying interiors of the home in which Garabedian was raised. In this work, titled Gentbrugge (1998–2009), the artist is again figured as a subject in diptych, dislocating the seeming certainty of both memory and identity within migratory experience.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The Lebanese Rocket Society: A Carpet, 2013; Carpet, documents. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Much of cultural experience comes in the form of narratives and the objects that prove these narratives, a reality explored by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s The Lebanese Rocket Society: A Carpet (2012). Along the gallery’s south wall, the collaborative team has arranged twelve columns of documentation on various projects funded by the American people in Lebanon, including a history of the massive eighteen-by-twelve-foot rug woven by over four hundred Armenian orphans between 1924 and 1925 in Ghazir and sent along with two of these orphans to the United States in 1926 for presentation to President Calvin Coolidge. Before this display lies a massive carpet of nearly the same dimensions, installed at a slight upward angle and showing a gigantic version of a found 1960s-era Lebanese stamp promoting the nation’s space program—a program somehow all but absent from Lebanon’s recorded history. Inverting the relation of object to narrative, the artists present an object that proves an unknown story and, in doing so, seems to beg its audience for a history, much as it has compelled Hadjithomas and Joreige.

Rabih Mroué. Shooting Images, 2013; Video; 9:15. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Two other works round out the show: Rabih Mroué’s Shooting Images (2013), a re-staging of footage shot by a Syrian civilian in Homs in which a sniper suddenly appears and fatally shoots the cameraman, and Libia Castro and Ólafus Ólafsson’s Your Country Doesn’t Exist—Do It Yourself (UK) (2013). Both works deal with staging and re-staging and the potential power of such gestures, though Mroué’s film turns toward the technologically fantastic possibility of recognizing the cameraman through the reflection in his killer’s eyes, while Castro and Ólafsson turn toward the willingness of a guest painter to alter or execute a prepared painting of the words “Your country doesn’t exist.” As each is a current or former national diplomat, the gesture is not without weight.

Libia Castro and Ólafus Ólafsson. Your Country Doesn’t Exist—Do It Yourself (UK), 2013; Mixed media, pen drawing and acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Throughout Long Ago and Not True Anyway, historical narratives are exposed to the familiar flux of personal memory. Intersecting the past of nations and places, subjective experiences open spaces of possibility, giving creative insight into the fragility of history.

Long Ago and Not True Anyway is on view at Waterside Contemporary, in London, through October 26, 2013.

Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz by Slavs and Tatars presents a re-imagination of an Iranian Polish Solidarity. Even to an eye unfamiliar with Iranian and Polish traditions, the strong reference to craft is apparent. On entering the dome-shaped gallery, the works appear to be part of a commemoration, with large and colorful handcrafted banners and woven objects.

Installation with banners by Slavs and Tatars, 'Friendship of Nations: polish shi'ite showbiz'. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

‘Pajaks’, crafted according to local customs and hang from the ceiling, are part of an annual Polish harvest celebration. In context of local customs, several of these ‘pajaks’ are made with Christmas lights, yarn, glass balls and even a Christmas tree.

Slavs and Tatars, 'Resist resisting god', 2010. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

Mirrored mosaics were invented by the Persians in the 7^th century to distinguish themselves from Arab neighbours. They are today exported by the Iranian republic as a symbol of its ideology. These are reconstructed in a recognisable form of a painting and when viewed from an angle, reveal the words “Resist Resisting God”.

Installation by Slavs and Tatars, 'Wheat Mollah', 2011. Courtesy the artists, Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © Yana Foque

Copies of a newspaper, 79.89.09, are displayed in a reading area with woven carpets and cushions. 79.89.09 points to three historical dates – the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1989 Fall of Communism and 2009 Financial Crisis – as points to understand our world today. While drawing out influences and coincidences between Iran and Poland, 79.89.09 also sheds light on the use of crafts. Slavs and Tatars explore the values evoked through crafts as revolutionary potential, from the mysticism conveyed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the steady and painstaking efforts of Solidarność, the Polish movement that peacefully brought down the Communist regime.

By fusing crafts with contemporary materials such as Christmas decorations and forms of display including encasements and wall installations, the exhibition situates this revolutionary potential amidst recent and ongoing protests, provoking questions on how one could engage in movements for change.

Installation view van Brummelen & de Haan, 'Subi dura a rudibus', 2010. Courtesy the artists, Motive Gallery, Amsterdam. © Yana Foque

Located next to Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz is Subi dura a rudibus, a film by Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan that similarly plays on interactions from representations of history. A diptych from sequential representations of the 1535 conquest of Tunis by emperor Charles V, it pairs together images of paintings by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen who accompanied Charles V and depicted the conquest for tapestry weavers, with images of the eventual tapestries. The pairing throws into relief divergent representations, questioning if representation can be accepted as objective truth, particularly as Vermeyen himself is part of the battle scene.

Lonnie Van Brummelen & Siebren De Haan, 'Subi dura a rudibus', film still, 2010. Courtesy the artists, Motive Gallery, Amsterdam. © Yana Foque

While Subi dura a rudibus questions the prospect and possibility of truth in the wake of interpretations, Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz harnesses the potential of imaginative interpretations to reinstate values embodied within craft and folklore, invigorating dialogue on how we can respond to present-day tensions.