This project is the outcome of several conversations with 15 Iranian individuals, living in the United States, whose identities are often assumed by others to only comprise their nationality. In this installation we tried to portray their complexity, depth and presence by asking them to share in a series of words and images that more accurately reflects their identity.

Mirroring the rich, interdependent, and shape-shifting world we live in, our sense of self is increasing in complexity and changing throughout our lifetime. This fluid self consists of many intersecting factors such as gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental and physical differences. By ignoring this diversity, each of us are too easily reduced to a label of ‘threat’, ‘resource’ or ‘irrelevant’. This inaccurate labeling darkens the glass we see others through and ourselves in.

This work was a collaboration between Farhad Bahram and Tom Lundberg.

Publication: PBS News Hour

A collaboration between artist Farhad Bahram and dancer Shannon Mockli that uses representation and movement to explore the relationship between the inside and outside, filtered by interrelated qualities that shape up our identity such as language, gender, race, history and politics. Bahram’s glass container places him as a discrete observer of the inside and also as an object of outside gaze. This collaborative experience portrays Bahram’s body wrapped in cultural text, while he interprets his own experience into movement through his body.

As a movement relationship develops between Farhad and Shannon, the work explores the potential of movement as communication. The two begin with becoming aware, of witnessing each other. The container speaks to an essential truth that as individuals, our understanding of this world and others is limited to our own unique physical existence—to all we have within our skin.

The evolving duet occurs in sections, the first built around recognition and using mirroring as a way to attend to one another, to work together on creating the same image. Their effort to create a singular image then evolves toward moving as a conversation, seeing and responding to what each other is doing, particularly using space as an inspiration—tracing each other’s body contour and filling up the negative space created by each body shape.

A string is then offered as a conduit for connection, literally connecting their body movements through the barrier of the container. This involves a high degree of negotiation to find a way of moving that supports connection and the individuality of each of them. It is the negotiation involved in the experience that becomes the metaphor for the kind of effort and sensitivity that understanding another requires.

The ritual of circling is conjured as this piece moves in a progressive fashion around the container, potentially speaking to the sacredness of each individual residing within one’s own container of experience and the sacredness of coming to know another as close as possible to press up against that container in search of understanding and expanding empathy.

This work was performed at Studio Without Walls, a public art event organized by ArtCity.

(Photo documentation: Pam Cressall, Bahador Yeganeh)

In the flows of current globalized climate, in which cultural signs are floating aimlessly without being anchored by any history or reality, investigating one’s identity by returning to its cultural roots seems no longer possible. All that is left is the assignment of our own identity in relation to the leftovers of culture and our lived experience. Considering this condition, the determination of the self has obsessively become the center piece in my recent works. Here I am hoping to explore my identity through an absurd cycle of negation, without forcing myself into a particular pattern of morality or nature. This exploration entails various cultural objects and signs that are both irreplaceable and provisional. They are supposed to exhaust the eternal recurrence of the self, and the identity that is staggering between the presence and absence.

The text that is written on the foot reads as follows:
This is an absurd cycle, without forcing itself into particular patterns of morality or nature. It is so far from my intention to portray any equivalence or resemblance. Whatever you see meant to be considered only as a starting-point. There is something provisional in my commentary that is irreplaceable. No one can judge the position it entails, as here one would find merely the description of an intellectual malady. No natural, moral or metaphysical law is involved. Here I am exhausting the limits of the possible.

The texts written on the leaves are a selection of the readings that inspired me to work on this project.

(Photo documentation: Tom Lundberg, Bahador Yeganeh)