Chupan Atashi(b. Iran) pronouns [They/Them He/him]
I am a photographer and artist who builds multimedia installations that function as spaces for growth, transformation, and grief. 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 as forces of transition, change, and rupture.Where do I return from my memories? Where do I arrive after I remember? Memory takes me to the realm of what is lost. Exile is an observatory for watching the time. The self is my primary material, as mitigated and constructed through different origin stories and the product of an interpretation. The self simultaneously receives and gives itself its form, the search for equilibrium between preserving constancy to the outside, accidents, and the others. The core of my work resonates with a history of violence and the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing sight of fact itself: the capacity to feel like oneself while being many.
The catastrophe is ongoing in my work. When the apocalypse is a frame. Seed is the care. Seeds are the diverse expression of life itself, ever hopeful, renewing, and sustaining. My seed story is my way home. It's my memory capsule. It's my forgotten memories. It's my ancestors' memories. Sprouting is the beginning, a growing center, putting roots into the hard soil and breaking through. Each of my installations feeds into the next one, with some elements returning and being repurposed and changed through the work itself.