Like a Circle in Spiral
For better understanding of the space, the video is available on: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sFueS30Vkj0uLxqULMofwrbHngnXYPRD/view?usp=sharing
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Maryam Tavakoli is a multidisciplinary artist based in Victoria, BC. Her practice questions the relationship between Identity, memory, and time. In her current works, she makes use of a variety of materials that can embody the vague distorted reflections of memory on identity through a combination of practices involving drawing, installation, and sculpture. She seeks to explore the concept of Identity through memories of lived life experiences, personal traumas, and the social/cultural structure of her home country.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As in the fear of water, that forever haunts the adult once rescued from drowning as a child. As in the post traumatic distress, with which forever the person struggles to see the world the same as before. Pieces of reason and knowledge, the perception of a “self”, the identity of a person, shapes through experiences, little by little, on the blank mind that one begins with. The Tabula Rasa as Locke puts it; the white paper void of characters that resembles the mind. Now imagine a gateway, a medium, that exposes the blank paper to many frames that narrate life. Memory. Memory that not just captures, but ties the self, the identity, to the experiences lived, being lived and still to live. This collection is an attempt to re-interpret the interdependent relationship between identity and memory.
Tavakoli uses visual strategies to deconstruct compositions, and then displace and distort the reality as we know it, to articulate that memory and identity cannot be defined separately given the complex overlapping nature of the two concepts. At the same time, her work shows while memories are often thought of as flashbacks to previous experiences, they do not simply preserve a pure representation of the past but are continuously distorted by elapse of time, momentary emotions, imperfect recollection, and so on. There can’t be two exact similar evocations of images and emotions when thought of the same memory.
By “Parsa Gooya”