(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. Their interdisciplinary and collaborative practice includes sculpture, drawing, film, sound, and performance in a multi-layered study of the relationship between the time of the self and the time of the world. Atashi investigates these temporalities as forces of transition, change, and rupture using unarchiving methods for the excavation of memories through documentation of the self. With the self as their primary material, they address the fragmentation of life and death beyond multiple timelines, often working with materials and processes of rot and decay, becoming and transformation.
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.