Two Archives is the first part of an ongoing series of works that evolve from the parallel re-reading of two seemingly remote archives of modernity in Iran. One is the western modern art collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art – a large collection which was put together and inaugurated in 1978 (together with the opening of the museum) as the peak of the government's rapid cultural modernization project. The collection was withdrawn into the cellar of the museum (and kept there for twenty years) a year after with the victory of the Islamic revolution. The other is the early archive of British Petroleum's origin in Iran between 1901 to 1951, when it found the first oil in the Middle East and built the modern industrial city and world’s biggest oil refinery in south-west Iran. What connects the archives is that they both are marked by a turn in the country’s status quo that resulted in archives abrupt displacement. It is this historically traceable displacement that is taken as a possible way of rethinking the geopolitics of the archive and contemporary art’s relationship to it.