you're not brown, just tan.
ITP at NYU Graduate Thesis.Site-Specific Multimedia Installation and Video Series, 2009-Ongoing.
“You’re not brown, just tan,” is an ongoing series of site-specific installations and television-themed videos investigating perceptions of cultural heritage via childhood memories, family legacy and media imagery. As a Baha’i half-Iranian artist raised in an Evangelical Texan suburb, my sense of cultural heritage is fractured and disjointed. Set in an imagined Iranian/American suburban living room, this installation proposes new forms of hybridity by displaying Iranian memory objects I constructed out of the acutal material of the Texan suburbs where I grew up, such as red roses made of Christmas wrapping paper taken from my childhood home. With a television at the center of the space screening a series of "shows" I created in different TV styles- a cooking show, music video, and movie trailer- I also utilize the medium that shaped my identity to disseminate my hybrid set of cultural cues to the viewers.
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ItaliaIrania! is a television fusion cooking show in which I inhabit my parents in my childhood home to cook a meal together.
KhaliKoobeh is a Persian music video using composited images from the Houston, Texan suburbs where I grew up. Singing the only 5 words I knows in Farsi, I explore not only the idea of being an outsider to both cultures, but also the power of language as a divisive or unifying device.
The Djinns Will Eat You is a horror movie trailer exploring the idea of interior/exterior space set to the Persian death metal band Zantoor.
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