August 2021
INVITATIONAL EXHIBITION
Maryam Khaleghi Yazdi
LIVING IN BETWEEN
“Living in Between” is an interactive, multimedia piece which contains four individual pieces. These pieces narrate my life as the result of living between two countries, which are Iran and the United States. The first three pieces are about changing the appearance of American objects. These objects are pickle jars, pizza boxes, and lottery tickets. I have picked these objects from my daily life to show how I see these objects as an immigrant. In these three pieces I am narrating my life as an immigrant in the past, present, and future to convey the concepts of development, loneliness, and vulnerability. The fourth piece is a short animation that narrates how I interact with my shadow that symbolizes my old and new thoughts. These thoughts are created in me as the result of living between two different cultures.
The reason that I am working on the concept of living in between is the United States is a diverse community, willing to accept different people from different cultures, but since the 2017 immigration executive order, our life has been changed a lot. This phenomenon made me reconsider the concept of home and my identity. Since, in the United States, people need to live in harmony with immigrants they should know about their life and the challenges they face. By my art I want to encourage American audiences to better understand us.
Also, due to socio-political issues, there are some specific stereotypical attitudes about immigrants. As “Living in Between” is an interactive piece, it challenges some of these attitudes by providing a visual atmosphere for audiences to imagine themselves as an immigrant and ask themselves “what I would feel if I was an immigrant?”
The first piece, which is an interactive piece ( Living in Between-Future), is about the future of an immigrant. The future of an immigrant is vague and vulnerable. Immigrants should expect a lot of different fortunes in their future. Various social, political, cultural, financial, and other parameters change the future of immigrants quickly. In this piece, I have designed 20 different fortunes that an immigrant can experience in the indefinite future. Audiences are one of the crucial parts of this interactive piece. To start, they should pick a lottery ticket from the wall, scratch it off, and reveal the numbers. They should find these numbers on a large wall next to the ticket wall. Each number corresponds with a short Gif or a static illustration. Audiences follow each number and see the related Gif/illustration in a sequence to find their fortune.
The second piece is about my immigrant life in the present ( Living in Between- Present). In contrast to my country, here I usually eat my food alone. Every day I deal with fast foods, packed in cardboard boxes. In this piece, as an immigrant, I am symbolically exposing my loneliness by narrating how I deal with food alone from early morning to night in a short animation. In this exhibition, I will project this short animation on a dozen blank pizza boxes installed on a wall. Indeed, I will use a wall, covered by pizza boxes, as my projection screen.
The third piece narrates my life as an immigrant in the past ( Living in Between-Past). In Iranian food culture, we need to wait for eight years to have a perfect garlic pickle. The older the pickle, the better. Indeed, a pickle is the symbol of the past and gradual self improvement. In this piece, I designed 12 pickle labels attached to different pickle jars. These labels narrate my developmental phases during the first year of immigration, which was very challenging. As immigration is a kind of rebirth, I have compared my developmental phases with the developmental phases of a newborn baby. These 12 pickle jars need to be placed on some pedestals or shelves attached to the wall. Audiences can interact with the jars by touching and holding them and reading the labels.
The last piece is a short animation that you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/_WhHF_MbtXE
"Morphing Shadow" is an animation about a girl who has moved from her country to another country. Whenever she gets bored and needs her family, she morphs her shadow into a box that contains her family members. She takes her family members from the box, communicates with them, turns them back to the box, and finally morphs the box into her shadow. There is a snake in some scenes that symbolizes dual feelings, happiness, and depression.
INVITATIONAL EXHIBITION
Maryam Khaleghi Yazdi
LIVING IN BETWEEN
“Living in Between” is an interactive, multimedia piece which contains four individual pieces. These pieces narrate my life as the result of living between two countries, which are Iran and the United States. The first three pieces are about changing the appearance of American objects. These objects are pickle jars, pizza boxes, and lottery tickets. I have picked these objects from my daily life to show how I see these objects as an immigrant. In these three pieces I am narrating my life as an immigrant in the past, present, and future to convey the concepts of development, loneliness, and vulnerability. The fourth piece is a short animation that narrates how I interact with my shadow that symbolizes my old and new thoughts. These thoughts are created in me as the result of living between two different cultures.
The reason that I am working on the concept of living in between is the United States is a diverse community, willing to accept different people from different cultures, but since the 2017 immigration executive order, our life has been changed a lot. This phenomenon made me reconsider the concept of home and my identity. Since, in the United States, people need to live in harmony with immigrants they should know about their life and the challenges they face. By my art I want to encourage American audiences to better understand us.
Also, due to socio-political issues, there are some specific stereotypical attitudes about immigrants. As “Living in Between” is an interactive piece, it challenges some of these attitudes by providing a visual atmosphere for audiences to imagine themselves as an immigrant and ask themselves “what I would feel if I was an immigrant?”
The first piece, which is an interactive piece ( Living in Between-Future), is about the future of an immigrant. The future of an immigrant is vague and vulnerable. Immigrants should expect a lot of different fortunes in their future. Various social, political, cultural, financial, and other parameters change the future of immigrants quickly. In this piece, I have designed 20 different fortunes that an immigrant can experience in the indefinite future. Audiences are one of the crucial parts of this interactive piece. To start, they should pick a lottery ticket from the wall, scratch it off, and reveal the numbers. They should find these numbers on a large wall next to the ticket wall. Each number corresponds with a short Gif or a static illustration. Audiences follow each number and see the related Gif/illustration in a sequence to find their fortune.
The second piece is about my immigrant life in the present ( Living in Between- Present). In contrast to my country, here I usually eat my food alone. Every day I deal with fast foods, packed in cardboard boxes. In this piece, as an immigrant, I am symbolically exposing my loneliness by narrating how I deal with food alone from early morning to night in a short animation. In this exhibition, I will project this short animation on a dozen blank pizza boxes installed on a wall. Indeed, I will use a wall, covered by pizza boxes, as my projection screen.
The third piece narrates my life as an immigrant in the past ( Living in Between-Past). In Iranian food culture, we need to wait for eight years to have a perfect garlic pickle. The older the pickle, the better. Indeed, a pickle is the symbol of the past and gradual self improvement. In this piece, I designed 12 pickle labels attached to different pickle jars. These labels narrate my developmental phases during the first year of immigration, which was very challenging. As immigration is a kind of rebirth, I have compared my developmental phases with the developmental phases of a newborn baby. These 12 pickle jars need to be placed on some pedestals or shelves attached to the wall. Audiences can interact with the jars by touching and holding them and reading the labels.
The last piece is a short animation that you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/_WhHF_MbtXE
"Morphing Shadow" is an animation about a girl who has moved from her country to another country. Whenever she gets bored and needs her family, she morphs her shadow into a box that contains her family members. She takes her family members from the box, communicates with them, turns them back to the box, and finally morphs the box into her shadow. There is a snake in some scenes that symbolizes dual feelings, happiness, and depression.
I'm Raktimava (Riju) Ghosh Dastidar a Kolkata and Mumbai based Photographer studying MFA in Visual Studies (concentration in Photography) in Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, Minnesota. USA. I've been studying metaphysics of gestures, forms and their concerns with exterior and interior self in visual medium (Photography) since 2018 and elaborately working on the abstract in large canvas since my first semester in college. Being an enthusiast, critic, practitioner of modern improvisational Music (instrumental), my vision is drawn from the dissonant sound, passed through binary channels forming soundscape as pixel palette; opening up an immense possibilities of interpretations. My visuals thus represent the dissonance and orientation of disorientation and deconstruction of memories and their syncopated rhythmic structures.
For inquiries contact the artists directly:
khaleghi@d.umn.edu
https://maryamkhaleghiyazdi.com/about
khaleghi@d.umn.edu
https://maryamkhaleghiyazdi.com/about