Bird Talk #9: Anahita Razmi
Anahita Razmi, videostill, I WANNA BE PART OF THE NON ALIGNED MOVEMENT
How can ambivalences, hybridity and ambiguity be described and visualised, and how and
when do they get lost? Where do they exist in a time that seems to be dominated by zeros and ones, categories and hashtags?
When are they perceived as an (ambiguous, undecided) stigma, when are they seen as a space of possibility? How do we experience
these 'swing states', these indeterminacies, and where do they become political?
In her lecture
New Swing States, the artist Anahita Razmi explores these and other questions, referring to her working practice
as well as to the meaning of language, place and culture anchored in it from a trans- and intercultural perspective. Anahita
Razmi's art often takes place in different sites and through changes of location, focusing on the performative nature of culture
and the relational aspects of these sites without relativising them. As a result, 'context' becomes artistic material, while
attempting to deconstruct power constellations between East and West, Global South and Global North.
GUEST
Anahita Razmi (*1981, Hamburg) is a German-Iranian artist who works with installation, performance and moving images.
In her transcultural artistic practice, she often employs strategies of appropriation and contextual displacement to deconstruct
relationships between image & power and identity & representation. Razmi's works have been shown in international
institutions such as the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Halle 14 in Leipzig, the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the
Kunstraum Innsbruck in Austria, the Sazmanab Centre for Contemporary Art in Tehran, the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the National
Art Center in Tokyo, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart as well as at the 7th Cannakale Biennale and the 5th Bucharest Biennale. In
addition to other international art prizes and grants, Razmi has received a scholarship from the Tarabya Cultural Academy,
Istanbul (2020/2023), the Goethe at LUX Residency, London (2018), the MAK-Schindler Scholarship, Los Angeles (2013) and the
Emdash Award, Frieze Foundation, London (2011).
