Past Resident
Sepideh Tajalizadeh Dashti
Sepideh Tajalizadeh Dashti is an emerging interdisciplinary artist. Her recent practice is related to exploring her body by creating performance, video, photography, and installations. Through multiple discourses and contexts, she is always rediscovering, reinventing, and reinterpreting her Iranian identity as a pivotal point for exploring her work in multiple and heterogeneous contexts.
“I am dealing with the psych of feeling ambiguity as being a multicultural individual, as this sense of ambiguity is derived from the differences between cultures and differences that exist within the same culture I am experiencing. This ambiguity evokes an unsettledness, that politicizes my space and comes to consciousness about my oppression as a woman. To respond to this consciousness, I strive to explore the construction of women’s identity through social expectations, politics, traditional culture, and conservative belief structures that shift between Middle-East and West cultures.”
Zolf
Installation (One Channel Video, Embroidery on Hair)
18:04 min
2020
Q&A with Sepideh Dashti (from Crosstown Arts newsletter, April 1, 2021)
Crosstown Arts Spring 2021 resident artist Sepideh Tajalizadeh Dashti is an emerging interdisciplinary artist who lives in Memphis. Sepideh earned her BFA in Fine Arts Studio Practice-Intensive Studio Specialization with an Honours Digital Arts Communication minor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She completed her MFA at Western University in London, Ontario, in 2020. Sepideh recieved various awards throughout her academic career, including the Lynn Holmes Memorial Award, the Curator’s Choice Award, and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship in social sciences and humanities research. Her artistic practice is related to exploring her body by creating performance, video, photography, and installation. Through multiple discourses and contexts, she is always rediscovering, reinventing, and reinterpreting her Iranian identity as a pivotal point for exploring her work in the multiple and heterogeneous context. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher talked to Sepideh about working in multiple mediums, how she prepares for live performance, and her current inspirations. Sepideh will give her virtual artist talk on Thursday, April 8 at 6 pm, along with two other Crosstown Arts residents — Joann Self Selvidge and Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo.
Jesse: Your practice is deeply immersed in performance, video, and photography. When did you realize these mediums were the best platform for your artistic voice?
Sepideh: When I started my Bachelor of Fine Arts at The University of Waterloo, I aimed to become a painter. I started painting when I was 11 years old and had two group painting exhibitions in my hometown in Iran. But I took some photography, video, and performance courses, and I found that I am more interested in new media rather than painting, especially after I took a one-week intensive performance workshop in Bancroft, Ontario, Canada. I realized that I want to express myself through performance art and use my body as a medium in my creative practice. I think it took about three years to realize my real interest. In my fourth year of my BFA, I decided to perform for the camera and present video and sometimes a photograph as my medium.
The works dedicated to trauma around your experience with socio-political organizations are very engaging. They merge with the legacy of performers such as Maria Evelia Marmolejo, Hannah Wilke, and Tania Bruguera. Where does a work begin for you? Is it writing? A movement? An image in your mind?
First, thank you. For me, it is a dream come true to see you consider my work as merged with the work of these incredible artists. I think my work, similar to the work of a new generation of contemporary Iranian artists, expresses doubt and obscurity concerning the crisis of the cultural and personal identities assigned to individuals. I examine various types of coded sign systems that reveal hidden realities about ways in which the patriarchal construction of society informs women’s experiences and expressions. I am not sure if my work follows movement, but there are some similarities between my work and those who explore their Iranian identities or diasporic identities. I think my work starts with an image in my mind. This image develops through exploring different materials, researching, and also inspiring other artists’ concepts and work.
I mainly focus on the ideas that I have experience with. However, I sometimes develop my ideas around a context that relates to my family or a community or group I find some similarities with. For these works, I combine elements of the visual arts with history and facts about the subject matter, or the philosophical theories around the context.
For example, in my work, Go with the Flow (2019), I explore the idea of having multiple and nomadic identities. This work is about my state of mind with the traumatic event called the Bloody November, when a series of nationwide civil protests in Iran, initially caused by a 50% to 200% increase in fuel prices, happened. This work is a time-specific work, as I did it after the event happened, and I wasn’t in a good emotional state of mind. It happened four months after I moved to the US, and migration comes with stress, anxiety, and pressure.
The work starts with a close-up of my open mouth, and the audience can hear the voices of people who joined civil protests in Iran in November 2019. They shouted “Death to Dictator” and ran away from the army guards, who shot the protesters. While the camera zooms out, the viewer can see a heavy bag of blood is dangling from my mouth. My open mouth narrates the violent reaction of the government to the protesters. By closing my mouth, which was very painful as the bag of blood was heavy, I started to drink water. I aimed to symbolize the feeling of being forced to be silent and not acknowledging the violence for the sake of my safety.
In this work, I explore self-expression or self-representation and attempt to invent modes of identification through performing my body in a state of intensive pain and agony. I use the idea of nomadic identity in Go with the Flow (2019), to create multiple identities related to my Iranian ethnicity and my experience being an immigrant, and I propose a shift toward inter-relational relationships with my audiences. While this nomadic identity is not marked by my geographical location, my life has indeed been divided since 2011 between Iran, Canada, and the States. The instability of my sense of identity and the construction of the nomadic subject has intersected and changed for me according to the social and political events where I have already been and where I no longer am.
Your 2020 exhibition, “To Be Me,” included some sculptural work. A partition curtain leading into the theater was adorned with text and hair. Is sculpture becoming part of your expanded practice?
I am interested in showing my video and photographs in an installation format. In the second year of my MFA, I started to create with objects collected around my house (fabric, yarn, wires, empty infant formula boxes, breastfeeding pads) and materials collected from my body (breast milk and hair). The objects and materials are normally associated with my femininity. Sometimes they belong to the domestic space of the home, where the role of females is normally assigned as a being housewife and mother. I’d like to expand this idea of creating a large installation. This is something that needs facilities, support, and a budget. For now, I think I focus more on exploring different ideas and materials and work on a small scale. Making objects such as a large praying bead, a large shopping bag, or a dress with breastfeeding pads, and using specific materials such as dough, hair, and breastmilk are becoming tools for my performances. As I said, these objects address the idea of exploring identity in the domestic space of my house.
How do you prepare for a live performance? Do you have any rituals to compose yourself before engaging with an audience?
Preparing for live performance requires a great amount of time for research and experiments. It depends on the theme of the performance. I did a live performance and had to explore the location and the site where I wanted to perform. Sometimes, the performance is time-specific, and sometimes, the performance is site-specific. So, I think the first step is to find why I want to perform here at this specific time.
The next step is preparing for the performance, which for me means making objects or videos or something that I want to use with my performance. I remember I spent two months preparing for a live performance, but had to change some aspects of it when I was on the site to perform. Doing live performance is out of my comfort zone, and every time I do it, I get stress hives.
However, I like to do it when I have a chance. I think live performance has more tension and transformative elements than performing for the camera. There are always elements of ambiguity and vulnerability for both the artist and the viewers in live performances. Live performances become a site of exchange for embodied subjects. I point to embodied subjectivity as a state of undertaking a close analysis of emotions sparked from our lived experiences. Through embodied subjectivity, we experience our bodies both subjectively and objectively in a reflexive process influenced by socio-cultural norms. I also think the embodied subjective of live performance creates a state of hyperawareness as our bodies become a source of healing and potential for self-transformational experiences.
What have you been working on lately? Have you found inspiration in any strange places?
I am currently preparing for a series of performances that address the idea of going against controlling women’s bodies in the context of Iranian culture and tradition. Also, it has been about six years since I have seen my family and my hometown, and I have become so homesick. So, my partner and I want to go back and visit my homeland for a short time.
I am traumatized by the memory of not being allowed to be who I want and wear what I like while in my motherland. The last time I was back home, I experienced not being welcome in some places because I didn’t have the proper hijab and didn’t follow the dress code that the regime of Iran asks women to adhere to in public spaces. Just imagine after 24 hours of flight, the moral police not letting you leave the flight terminal because your scarf is not properly covering your hair, and you are not wearing socks, even though you have on a long skirt.
I am preparing some setups, materials, and objects to perform for the camera. I am crocheting tulips and embroidering hair on grid pattern fabric for two different ideas that I am working on. Sewing and crochet both require a great amount of time. I am not sure if I can finish them by the end of this residency, but I did one performance with air dry clay and plan to do another with sand in a few days. I plan to create three or four videos and one series of photographs. I work on several projects at the same time, and I find this is the best way to manage and continue my artwork while parenting and keeping other commitments. I can do some of the works at home and some of them in my studio.
For the sound, I used a combination of different YouTube videos that were uploaded by people in the protest. The national media and news of Iran never cover Iranian people’s protests, and people use YouTube or similar platforms to document the events of their protests.
Thank you so much, Sepideh! We wish you luck with the series of performances!
