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Gelare Khoshgozaran

As an interdisciplinary artist, writer and translator I work across the mediums of video, performance, installation and writing. My work is an inquiry into the normalization of violence through seemingly innocuous aesthetic means. Informed by the experience of living the first four years of my life during the Iran-Iraq war, I address the concreteness of that experience vis á vis the neoliberal abstractions of violence in drone-age U.S.A. Through performance I explore perversion as a tactic for the recognition of the artist’s complacency and complicity in the creation of difference forms of violence.

A sequel to my video and research project, “rial and tERROR”, my recent body of work is an aesthetic study of the visual and textual materials from sites of personal and collective trauma. My video-installation, “Cosmos” is a work in progress, composed of the Iranian right-wing newspaper, Kayhan (Cosmos) for every day that it was published during the nine months of my mother’s pregnancy with me during the war. The newspapers were shipped to me directly from Iran where I can no longer return due to my exile as a queer and political asylee in the U.S.

Residing in Los Angeles, I imagine and experience the city as a space between asylum as “the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee” and the more dated meaning of the word, “an institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill.”