The Secret History of the Carthaginian War Elephant is the first collaborative installation and ongoing project that Shahpour Pouyan (CRF 2016) has with the novelist Anelise Chen. This new body of work creates a direct dialogue between fiction and sculpture, an attempt to examine the enigmatic within a historical context.
Using research about elephants, military history, and Hannibal, they synthesize a dream-history through which the elephant becomes a proxy for exploring the dynamics of power. By telling this dream-history through the institutional mode of archaeological curation, Pouyan and Chen also call attention to the ways in which historical narratives are always fictions of a kind. Institutional memory is often influenced by political agendas, which we see manifesting in myriad ways in the current moment.
This installation is currently on view in the 5th edition of Jaou Tunis, a group exhibition organized by Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunis.