HD video, two channel, loop, colour, stereo sound, 2025
The Storm Drives Us, The Storm Holds Us is a two-channel video installation, by Vida Kashani and Amir Komelizadeh that explores how resilience and solace emerge through persistence, memory, and struggle. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the Angel of History and Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, the work contemplates the tension between destruction and renewal, how we are both propelled forward and held in place by the storm of history.
Through archival footage of protest, resistance, and everyday defiance, combined with the intimate voice of a woman who bears witness to time, the installation becomes a space where past and present coexist. It is here, in the fragments of memory and the traces of collective struggle, that a quieter form of consolation appears — not as escape, but as endurance.
Freedom, like solace, is never a final destination; it is an act of staying, remembering, and continuing to move — even within the storm.
After Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” IX
Paul Klee painted a figure he called Angelus Novus. The angel looks as if she is about to move away from something she cannot stop watching. Her eyes are wide, her mouth is open, her wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.
She faces the past, where we see a sequence of events, but she sees only one single catastrophe: ruins piled upon ruins at her feet. She would like to stay, to awaken the dead, to repair what has been broken. But a storm blows from paradise. It catches in her wings with such force that she cannot close them. The storm propels her forward, into a future she cannot see, while the wreckage before her grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress.
Credits
By Vida Kashani and Amir Komelizadeh
Sound design Mahoor Mirshakak, Amirhossein Taghavi
Wall graffiti Patrick Hoving
Voice-over and performer Julia-Beth Harris
With special thanks to
Archive.org, Internet Archive, Prelinger Archives, Library of Congress, British Pathé,
het Beeld en Geluid Instituut, UCLA Library Digital Collection, and people who share their videos on social media.
Supported by VidAmir Foundation
Exhibited at
Art Without borders, group exhibition, A Kerk Netherlands, Groningen, NL, 2025
Film Festival Assen, De Nieuwe Klok, Assen, NL, 2026