January 24 - February 24, 2022

Press release

Counterpoint, includes recent and new photography, textile, and video installation work by Sepideh Dashti. Using personal and marginalized methods of research, as an artist Dashti performs her bodily material, stitching her hair and blurring the boundaries between languages, to challenge ideas of femininity and domesticity and depict the experience of her diaspora.

Not all diasporas are the same. Not all female experiences of oppression are the same. Dashti’s experience as an Iranian diasporic woman is fragmented along ethnic, religious, social, political, and class lines. These fragments pose challenges to her attempts to bind with others and find solidarity based in multiculturalism and ethnicity. Dashti establishes her body as an integral material in her art practices to make the explanation of her experiences and challenges possible. She seeks to claim her body across multiple media to question her identity with regard to the deplorable conditions of history, language, and culture existing between different spaces she has occupied.

About the artist:

Dashti is an emerging interdisciplinary artist who lives in Memphis, TN, USA. She got her MFA from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada in 2020. Her artistic practice is related to exploring her body by creating performance, video, photography, and installation. Through multiple discourses and contexts, she is always rediscovering, reinventing, and reinterpreting her Iranian identity, as a pivotal point for exploring her work in the multiple and heterogeneous context. She is also interested to cross field appropriation of the dominant philosophy and the technology of video with her lived experiences in the process of making art work.  Dashti earned her BFA, Fine Arts Studio Practice-Intensive Studio Specialization, Honours Digital Arts Communication Minor, at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada with the Dean’s Honours List. She is also a recipient of various awards such as the Lynn Holmes Memorial Award and Curator’s Choice Award during her BFA. She received the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship in social sciences and humanities research in 2019. Her work has been showcased nationally and internationally.