«Seep, 2012 Seep is an installation of video projections, objects and prints. Back ground: In 2011, Tabatabai and Afrassiabi began a series of works that juxtapose two 20th century archives in the UK and Iran. One produced by British Petroleum (BP, then known as the Anglo Iranian Oil Company) documents the company's operations in Iran beginning in 1908 and ending with the nationalisation of the oil industry in 1951. The other is the collection of modern Western art acquired by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art during the late 1970s and withdrawn from public display for twenty years following the Islamic revolution in 1979. The artists' approach to these archives considers their suspension, through discontinuation (in the case of the oil company) or removal (in the case of the museum). Seep – 1, 2012 HD video and prints on paper, 5.46 min., avg. 21 x 26cm. One of the videos in the installation incorporates documents from the British Petroleum archive relating to a film that was produced by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company in 1948 to present the oil industry's modernising effect on Iran. TitledPersian Story, the film was produced in Technicolour and was an idealised account of Anglo Iranian's activities, in line with the narrative recounted in the company's archive, but its production coincided with political disputes around oil and the closure of the refinery, and these factors inevitably encroached on the film's plot. Tabatabai and Afrassiabi's video dramatises a letter from the archive in which the director, who was commissioned to make the film, complains about the 'unfilmability' of his subject matter. Seep – 2 (Southwest Iran), 2012 HD video, 17.39 min. A second video follows the artists as they travel to different sites in south west Iran – the geographical site that the BP archive registers – capturing images of natural oil seeps as they ooze from the ground. The notion of the oil seep – crude oil materialising naturally, but beyond historical purpose, disregarding even the ground over and through which it spreads – informs Tabatabai and Afrassiabi's reading of these two archives and implicitly traces connections between them.» [Descripció de Seep 1 i Seep 2 realitzada pels artistes al Qüestionari sobre les obres. Aquesta descripció es basa en el text de presentació del projecte Seep a Chisenhale, Londres, 2013 (http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/exhibitions/current_exhibition.php)]