(b. Iran) pronouns [They/Them He/him]
Chupan Atashi is a photographer and artist who builds multimedia installations that function as spaces for growth, transformation, and grief. Atashi look at the relationships between the times of the self and the times of the world. Through excavation of memories, unarchiving methods , and documentation of the self, they investigate these temporal relationships as forces of transition, change, and rupture. Theories of temporality help them address the fragmentation of self, life, and dreams across multiple timelines The self is their primary material, as mitigated and constructed through different origin stories and the product of an interpretation. This trajectory has led them over time toward an increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative practice moving across and between installation and performance. The core of Aashi’s 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 one’s “self” while being many. As an Iranian artist their work is shaped by experiences of displacement and by moving between cultural contexts. They create from a position of in-betweenness—never fully here or there, always translating, always negotiating multiple languages and references. This position has become the source of their work's particular vision- a consideration of the self that moves toward a collapse of the self, the transformation of pain into healing.