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. Theories of temporality help me address the fragmentation of self, life, and dreams across multiple timelines. I look at the relationships between the times of the self and the times of the world. Through excavation of memories, anarchiving methods , and documentation of the self, I investigate these temporal relationships as forces of transition, change, and rupture. Memory takes me to the realm of what is lost. Exile is an observatory for watching the time. Where do I arrive after I remember? The self is my primary material, as mitigated and constructed through different origin stories and the product of an interpretation. This trajectory has led me over time toward an increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative practice moving arcoss and between installation and performance.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 one’s “self” while being many. Each of my installations feeds into the next one, with some elements returning and being repurposed and changed through the work itself.