Sepideh Dashti is an emerging interdisciplinary artist from Memphis, Tennessee, United States. In 2020, she earned her MFA from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. In her practice, she explores her body through performance, video, photography, textile, and installation. As a pivotal point of her creative practice, she is always rediscovering, reinventing, and reinterpreting her Iranian identity, through multiple discourses and contexts. She is also interested in cross-field appropriation of contemporary philosophy, feminist theories, and technology with her lived experiences in the process of making artwork. She received the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship in social sciences and humanities research in 2019.
Website:
https://sepidehdashti.com/
proposal
Exploring my body/self as technologized, with the idea of being unfixable in identity, I articulate my body/self in performance art that intersects with the technology of camera. Amelia Jones in her “Body Art, Performing the Subjects” points to reclaiming the “posthuman” body/self through performance art with the intersection of the technology of video. [1] I explore the ways in which technology might lead to insights into the experience of embodiment. I enact my body-oriented practice with the exploration of multiplying the components of identity. I focus on the traumatized female body, representing it in abject or grotesque states, sometimes evoking an agonized, or melancholic state of mind. I use the corporeal grotesque as a bodily metaphor for the anatomical female body, and I see this grotesque body as a positive and powerful figuration of cultural feminism and womanhood that points to a state of being between hope and anxiety. [2] I regard video technology as a vehicle to enact myself with particularity within a contemporary social and political context. I mobilize my body-oriented practice for the purpose of exploring and multiplying the components of identity. In my recent body of works I explored the cross-cutting connections between the human organ, body and hair, the nonhuman material, domestic and household objects to create a dialogue between my body and bio-politics. I have a coalition of interests between feminist figurations of a posthuman subjectivity with Rosi Braidottie’s position of promoting radical posthuman subjectivity that rests on the ethics of becoming. Braidottie suggests that we all need to explore with intensity to realize the capability of the posthuman bodies. [3] She emphasis on the necessity of understanding the notion of sexual complexity of both human and posthuman along the axes of multiplicity and heterogeneity. [3] This is what she has called the feminist becoming-woman as the virtual feminine, posthuman feminine, that look for the subversion of dislocating identities and the disruption of standardized patterns of sexualized interactions. [3] I propose series of performing for the camera to explore how camera participates in the production of bodies by endowing them with political constitution. I represent my body fragmented and dispersed across the multiple channels of videos, that show abstracted life-sized body parts. [1] Amelia Jones, Body Art Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 202. [2] Mary J. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1. [3] Disch, Lisa Jane, and M. E. Hawkesworth. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 689.
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