Exhibitions

SEPIDEH DASHTI: LIMINALITY

Beverly and Sam Ross Gallery (Christian Brothers University) / 650 East Parkway South August 27, 2022 - October 8, 2022

Sepideh Dashti

Liminality, the concept I use for my contemporary feminist thinking on immigration and diaspora to tackle the complexity of the experience of living under the tyrannical authority of the government ruling my homeland and living a nomadic life since I have immigrated. By detaching places and words from their original meaning, liminality defines the cartography of the body and mind. In this mapping, I examine the relationship between emotion, bodily sensation, and cognition in order to develop metaphors to reflect on Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of nomadism, “which is transmutation, where one is forced to elude. The nomad is no longer, the exiled, the minority, the other, the ‘exceptional individual’ who has many possible positions.”

Adopting a transdisciplinary approach and using personal and marginalized methods of research, as an artist, I perform through my bodily material, stitching my hair, using technology, and blurring the boundaries between languages, to challenge ideas of femininity and domesticity and to depict my diasporic experience. Through material consideration, my encounter with different cultures presents homelands that are simultaneously afar and held close, diasporas in my own term.