Sepideh Behrouzian

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Sepideh Behrouzian

Preferred pronouns:

she/her
Birth year:

1985
Primarily based in or works from:

Iran, Islamic Republic of Netherlands
Skills:

critical thinking and writing film editing multimedia installation
Topics:

climate colonialism patriarchy
Contact information:

Currently working on:

Currently, Behrouzian is invested in finding the relations between the global ocular-centric visuality and thus the production of linear progressive temporality/spatiality_based on white male citizen subject_to the modernization of Iran since the 1950s.

Quick Facts:

Behrouzian's multi-layered practice engaged with contradictions' complexity and duality and interrogated the knowledge and power dynamics that produce universal definitions of concepts. Interested in the notions of Voids, Zero, representation, visuality, and non-linear temporality in the context of understanding the place both local and extra local, she seeks possible articulations and encounters of things in between time-space and structure. In doing so, she adopts the devices of staged speculative storytelling, narrativity, and poetry to evoke unfamiliar forms of reading, listening, and thinking of the perception and representation of her lived-experienced encounters. In her practice, Sepideh explores ways to theorize and structure a narrative on the limit of the division between being and non-being, and thus to capture a moment of “becoming.” With outcomes such as video, installation, image, diagram, and text, and are exposed as exhibitions, performances, and publications. She developed an MA thesis on the coloniality of image and vision based on crossing narratives concerning the Islamicate cosmology.

Three relevant works from the last 5 years of artistic practice:

Time Tunnels (Happiness / Nostalgia: a Story of Linear Time) Part of the series Promises of Ever-coming Prosperity, video: 8 min
Zero/... , Video. 2021. 12 min
Circling the square #2: The transitional zone between repetition and difference 2022, Wood installation. size variable

Highest educational degree:

2020, MA. DAI Art Praxis, Dutch Art Institute

Work samples:

Portrait or Landscape, Anahita?

Portrait or Landscape, Anahita ?

2023 Solo exhibition

Berlin

Film Installation Portrait or landscape, Anahita? is an exhibition by Sepideh Behrouzian at with the rubbles of old palaces, showing her film of the same title. Her work follows the continuous shaping of a colonial frontier: from oil-mining as a colonial practice, spanning through the promise of development be-coming the new placeholder for “overcome” extractive colonial practices, all the way to a flattened representation of a dystopian climate devasta-tion that obscures its asymmetrical effects.

Contact me for the password

Time Tunnels

Time Tunnels (Happiness / Nostalgia: a Story of Linear Time) Part of the series Promises of Ever-coming Prosperity

video 8 min

Time Tunnels (Happiness — Nostalgia: a Story of Linear Time) is a re-reading of Sia Armajani’s work before/after (1970). In her work, Sepideh Behrouzian reconceptualizes Armajani’s formulation of a linear temporality into a structure where happiness is the object of desire. This happiness becomes not only the object of acquisition, possession, distribution, and contagion but also a duty that perpetually stays out of reach.

In Time Tunnels, Behrouzian instrumentalizes the popular and very distributed footages of Iran’s previous regime. This footage was once used in the previous regime’s propaganda to represent the happy prospect of Iran in an era to come. Today, these footage are used by the opposition to look back at a lost happiness. In both cases, happiness becomes an object impossible to acquire, yet with a strong power to evoke and mobilize society. Through associations and cinematic effects, Behrouzian inserts these footages into two opposing linear temporalities, happiness becoming an unattainable promise that stretches both into the future and the past, creating a tunnel of linear time.

To watch the video email me

Zero/...

2021

12 min

Zero/... project is a research that has been initiated since 2019 to rethink and expand zero beyond a numerical position and the signifier of pure nothingness. I have looked for counter-absoluteness within its history and historiography that has been obscured yet contains potency, materiality, and resistance. in that sense, instead of being an objective number, zero for me becomes an alternative subjectivity whose uncertain and recursive travel through time-space has been interrupted by a linear progressive history and confined her metamorphosis merely within a unified globalized cosmogony. However, Zero/... challenges the bipolar categorizations of modernity as it initially challenges the boundary between life and death. The outcome has taken the form of poetry condensed not only through crafting the words, objects, and images but also through the corporeality and performativity of voice.

Zero/… has been shortlisted for the Amsterdam open book prize, Versal 2022. It has been manifested in the form of video and performed on a number of occasions such as my individual contribution to the second collective iteration of the Belly Button Conference/Eurasia Underground Library in Considering Monoculture, 2020 co-convened by M HKA, Van Abbemuseum & de buren, Brussels and in DAI Planetary Campus, in Silent Green, Berlin, 2019.

to watch the video or to read the poem email me

Circling the square #1

online Publication/lecture-performance/installation

Circling The Square was initially a polyphonic publication, drafted from margins and annotations and performed as one possible reading of the publication among others in Radio Kootwijk as my graduation act in Dutch Art Institute 2020

The online publication has been shared with the participants and accommodates them with possible readings of the publication as well as listening and sitting with my selected reading.

This publication is an annotation/offspring to the body of the research/thesis over 2018 to 2020 in the Dutch Art Institute under the title “kaleidoscoping vision”. This essay aims at unfolding the implications of visualization as actualization when revisiting the normative definition of vision as not merely an optical faculty but the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.

It focuses on "plan" as a Geo-metrical but also providential practice within particular cosmologies, this essay/performance Juxtaposes two different implementing of the geometrical plans: Industrial blueprints, and Muqarnas that each bears different consequences.

The collection of texts not only dismantles a single and linear narration but also challenges the practices of Geo-Metry as a universal science by drawing on its application in different onto-epistemologies.

to read the essay or to watch the performance email me

Circling the square #2: The transitional zone between repetition and difference

2022

Wood

10 x 12 x 20 each piece without their stands, 18 pieces, installation variable

This multi-pieced sculptural work is part of the group exhibition in A tale of Tub in Rotterdam it curls on the floor, and tries to smooth the corners and pillars on the opening of the mezzanine. The work dissects, rearranges, and re-positions muqarnas, a vaulting form in Islamic architecture. The transitional zone between the square of a chamber to the circle of a vault or dome transgresses the duality between functionality and decoration by means oof mediation. The mediality of muqarnas and its geometry offer an order distinct from mass production processes that employed the egalitarian properties of geometry to enable repetitive production and liberal accessibility. While geometry not only orders the visual elements on a representational plane, it also disciplines social and political orientations (as long as “drawing a line creates a formless outside where monsters live”). The geometry of muqarnas is proposed here to be calculated only in relation to itself, opposing it to calculations that aim to represent the world as normative and binding. The sculptural installation considers muqarnas as a social form, modalities for forging ties, as a collaboration between theory and practice, and individualizes the triangular elements that enable muqarnas to circle an imaginary square. Here, these elements are placed on the ground instead of the ceiling, on a horizontally curved line instead of a vertical one.

The Very First Moment

2018

Graphite and crayon on paper roll, oil on paper, eroded pieces of wood collected by the river ancient pieces of clay pots, thread, CRT TV, Oil Paintings on paper, wood constructions, Foam

This site-specific installation tries to respond to the Electric Room space (in Dastan Gallery) to dismantle the normative understanding of time-space, by asking questions on how values are imprinted on space and time. how could scale become an ontological state? where does "I" as an autonomous subject depart? and how does it depends on its technological apparatus, social constructions as well as language?

"The very first moment", points to the theory of the Big Bang, but also goes beyond a scientific conceptualization through the science itself:

The inability to locate a particular point as the origin,

Where the deep past comes from a future. and linear time becomes contestable.

When the microcosm and macrocosm show correspondence.

When the color blue emerges in "our" sight only when "we" have a word for it.

When my TV white snow shows me some impact of the origin. (The cosmic microwave background blankets the universe and is responsible for a sizeable amount of static on analog television)

When mechanisms' and organisms' borders get confused.

When "I" within the spectrum of Being, appears at some scale then fades again.

Soda Lime

Soda Lime ( Part of the group exhibition "Impossible Journeys in the Netherlands, Russia, and Persia: Now and Then"

2019-2020

soda lime collected in Iran, soil, unformed glass, prism, light, a looped video in small LED screen

200x 300 cm Installation

The site-specific installtion on the floor is my individual contribution to the Soda Lime project, gone along with a video by Oleg-Elagin(RU) on a screen devised by a mirror at the back suggested by Cecilia-Hendrikx(NL).

Soda_liam attempts to look beyond the subjacent tangle of colonialism, eurocentrism, and misogyny while inspired by the book Three Journeys by 17th-century Dutch explorer Jan Streys.

Soda Lime is a type of sand exported from Iran and melted into glass for installation.

It traveled opposite to Jan Struyss, taking the storyline full circle, from the 17th century into ours.

The three artists surf these waves to question the very phenomenon of viewing – as they go in search of the old route once traveled by Jan Struys.

As in the book, rivers are key. Rivers connecting regions with transformative powers. The installation represents a geometrical plan of a cube box that traveled between Iran, Russia and the Netherlands and is intended to secure its content.

In this installation, the Heideggerian concept of the stock-pile standing reserve finds its connection to vision and representation politics.

A specific worldview that has rendered the whole world as raw material to be consumed in a productive apparatus in a loop, how is it coincident with a specific visual representation? In other words, how do a particular optic and inscribing knowledge system make way for a colonialist worldview that turned the earth into the object of ownership and extraction?