The Magic Circle
collaboration with Atoosa Pour Hosseini
The Magic Circle is a film and installation by Atoosa Pour Hosseini, inspired by early avant-garde cinema and the elemental forces of light, water, fire, and air. Blurring illusion and reality, the work depicts a veiled sorceress enacting rituals of conjuring and protection against shifting seascapes, candlelight, and fire. Using the textures of 8mm and 16mm film, digital processes, and sculptural elements, Pour Hosseini creates a dreamlike exploration of memory, perception, and suppressed histories of women’s knowledge.
My collaboration with the project included performing in the film and in its live expanded cinema versions at the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin and at the Tehran Contemporary Sound Festival at Bethanien Studio 1 in Berlin. To learn more, visit Temple Bar Gallery.
Citizens of Nature
collaboration with Avideh Saadat Pajouh, Vafa Aminikia, and Esther Samuels-Davis,
Citizens of Nature is an intermodal collaborative project and artistic intervention, presented at the Wannsee Rowing Club for ZK/U’s Citizenship and its travelers on the way to Documenta 15 in Kassel. The project explores bypassing cultural, political, and biological borders through symbolic processes of naturalization, culminating in participants receiving a Citizenship Card for nature. A temporary virtual platform extended this process online, allowing those unable to attend in person to engage with the ritual and claim their symbolic citizenship in the natural world.
My contribution focused on concept development and the creation of an initiation ritual for the artists sailing the Citizenship, marking a transformative moment of belonging and interrelation with the more-than-human world.
Passport (Argonauta)
Fabrication for Zac Langdone-Pole
This series combines delicate paper Nautilus shells with carefully shaped fragments of meteorite housed within Argonauta shells. The work transforms cosmic remnants into poetic sculptures, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and celestial materiality. The pieces gracefully bridge natural history and contemporary craft, recontextualizing meteorites as intimate, earthly artifacts.
My contribution to this project was forming and polishing the various meteorite pieces to fit precisely inside the Argonauta shells in a variety of forms and sizes.
The project was awarded the BMW Art Journey 2018. For more about the project, visit here.
Breakfast with Dinosaurs
collaboration with Shahram Entekhabi
Breakfast with Dinosaurs is focused on a social dimension: living in a megapolis city, Tehran, and the different social manifestations of contemporary Iranian society.
The film shows the binary opposition of "inside" and “outside" life; The contrast between the inner life inside private homes/empty spaces and the restless fast and crowded awareness of outer space. It uses the conversations/interviews with the taxi drivers in the city as a link or an intermediate stage between these two entities. (It is very common for private cars to take passengers along the way to be able to survive in Tehran.) These conversations/ true stories are brought into play as a way of "mapping" the city, based on the life experiences of the chauffeurs.
The abstract, performative actions of a female character, poetically expressing deprivation, abandonment, melancholy, and the sense of victimhood add a mysterious third layer to the film.
