7.12.2020 Lecture
Mehraneh Atashi
(1980) is an Iranian artist currently living in Amsterdam. Since her BFA in photography in Tehran, and her postgraduate education at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, she has developed a body of work consisting of assemblages, sculpture, photography and video. Shifting between conceptualism and materiality, imagery and iconography, Atashi’s practice explores the possibility of becoming within static systems as well as concepts of gaze. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at de Appel Amsterdam, Framer Framed Amsterdam, M HKA Antwerp, REDCAT Los Angeles, Artissima Turin, Salzburger Kunstverein, Graz Kunstverein Palais, de Tokyo Paris.
‘I look at the relationship between the time of the self and the time of the world. Through an excavation of memories, archiving and documentation of the self, I investigate these temporal relationships.
My past seems to deform due to the lack and omission of cumulative documents. How much is my memory dependent to these documents, and how do these memories form the future? Future as a subjective idea,which
de-negates, deconstructs and changes the present conditions. The self is my main material, the different origin stories and the product of an interpretation. The self simultaneously receives and gives itself its own form, the search of equilibrium between the preservation of constancy to the outside, accidents and the others.
The result is a tension comes out of the resistance and this resistance makes transformation happen. Transformation is never an end in itself, rather, transformation is a tool: it’s the force that pushes life together and then pulls it apart; I’m interested to understand what kind of changes are generated by transformation and how can I control this process. Questioning the bio politics that grows from attention to another way of being. Experiences and memories, all concur, with equal importance, to the shaping of reality. The interplay of remembering and forgetting is both central to life. I express the entangled nature of life – the way in which small objects, chemical processes, personal experiences and memories, all concur, with equal importance, to the shaping of reality.’