Can we recognise the moment when we should not cross, consent, or look away? Can we resist, survive, disrupt, or subvert the game of censorship? And when do these strategies begin to sustain the very system they were meant to endure?
»The Game We Knew but Didn’t Play« explores censorship as a power struggle that enters artistic processes, relationships, and everyday encounters. It asks how censorship shapes what can be said and shown, but also how it affects institutions, communities, and the ways artists negotiate, adapt, remain silent, take risks, or continue working within restrictive structures.
The work grows out of Azadeh Ganjeh’s research into German theatre productions presented in state-controlled venues in the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 Revolution. Shaped by the perspective of exiled artists who have experienced censorship, these cases become a point of departure for examining censorship across different political, cultural, and institutional contexts.
Developed by Rebel-IST-hah! members Foad Esfahani and Azadeh Ganjeh, in collaboration with Lisa Lucassen, Jule Flierl, and Philine Rinnert, the performance draws on documentary materials, historical case studies, personal archives, biographies, and performative actions. Together, these materials expand the inquiry into how our lives, choices, and actions become implicated in systems of censorship.
Each performance opens a room for questions. How does censorship enter that room? How does it become an invisible part of aesthetic decisions, institutional agreements, or artistic collaborations? And who benefits from the compromises and entanglements that follow?
What did we know about the game? And what might we do if we could turn knowledge into action?
Rebel-IST-hah! is a performance and research collective founded by Azadeh Ganjeh and Foad Esfahani in Tehran, Iran, in 2006 and based in Berlin since 2022. Through performance art, research, and collaborative processes, the collective engages with social and political questions, examining how people encounter power through bodies, spaces, institutions, and narratives. Over the years, Rebel-IST-hah! has moved between conventional and unconventional spaces and collaborated with interdisciplinary artists, performers, researchers, and diverse communities. It’s work from performance activism, Immersive theatre, Audio plays, Lecture performances and stage-performances brings together documentary and archival materials, embodied practices, memory, and performative experimentation to witness activism, open spaces of appearance, invite participation in the performance and/or reality, and imagine alternative forms of political togetherness.
