SHAHRZAD MALEKIAN

Participatory performance in public space/ Oslo/ 2021

Photo: Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo

Solo exhibition/ Tenthaus/ Oslo/ 2021

Photo: Øystein Thorvaldsen, Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo

In collaboration with Alessandro Marchi

Solo Exhibition, Studio 17, Stavanger, 2022

Photography: Eivind Egeland

Pop up sculpture in public space/ Bjorvika, Ensjø and Akerselva/Oslo / 2020

In collaboration with Bianca Hisse

Performers:

Anne Katrine Haugen, Bianca Hisse, Eleni Ieremia, Espen Olaisen, Hedda Fossland, Maya Mi Samuelsen, Shahrzad Malekian, Vasil Gjuroski, Åshild Thinn

Vårscenefest 2021

In colaboration with Bianca Hisse

Galerie 35m2 & SUMO Festival

A group of performers drag, carry, and support each other through the city. Almost like a slow painting in motion, their movements appear and disappear among the passersby, merging a long-lasting choreographic composition with the architectural and social patterns of the city.

Soft Play is inspired by Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, but also by a variety of other sources such as children's play, protests, political struggles and police control Soft Play explores the sculptural potential of the body and how power dynamics, dominance and verticality manifest in the social arena.

Performers:

Michaela Dašková

Darja Lukjanenko

Edita Antalova

Tereza Holubová

Eva Urbanová

Shira Roth

Petra Smutná

Bouncing Narrative is an interdisciplinary collaboration project. With the main focus on “embodiment of trauma narrative,” the project affords a dialogue between performance and mobile installation in a public space. The installation creates an atmospheric space inhabited by the audience and the performers.

Through the alienation of the performer’s body, observed as it was from an unusual/disconcerting perspective, the work explores the gap between the self and the “other,” between acceptable and unconventional and traumatic experience, those that cannot be expressed in words—and bounce back again and again.

Together with:

Shahrzad Malekian - Artist/concept

Roza Moshtaghi - Choreographer/ concept

Lykourgos Porfyris - Sound artist/poster

Gerd Kaisa Vorren - Performer

Trine Lise Moe - performer

Carl Love Nilsen - Assisting scenographer

Shiva Sherveh - Costume designer

Martin Myrvold - Light designer

Julie Olsen - Producer

Josh Lake- Documentation

Premiered June 14th, 2019, Salt, Oslo, No

Durational participatory performance/ Sommerøya 2019/ Four hours

Photo: Jarle skjæveland, Morteza Masuleh

Three-channel video/ HD/ 12’:10”/ 2016

Wake up stories is fiction in three movements, narrated in three separated scenes.

In the first part, the performer is sitting on huge self-made wooden eggs while she is knitting. This screen is about care, motherhood, wait, and repetition. In the second one, the performer struggles to roll the eggs up the hill. A Sisyphean attempt that eventually leads to the loss of eggs. In the third fragment, the eggs would be burnt to create something new. It is a recall of the Phoenix, a common myth in the ancient mythology of Iran, China, Greek, and Egypt. It is a bird without any pair. In association with the Sun, a phoenix obtains new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor who was plunging itself into flames.

Using minimal and repetitive vocabulary, connecting to “the other” - the nature- become the main components of the performative act/ ritual. Through this connection and conversation, the new life arises, the flames of hope for changing the future.

Performance/ durational / 2015

The Vitruvian man surveys the proportion of the male body. Inspired by this, the artist tries to reclaim a new feminine reading on the study of the body. Circles that represent the feminine spirit and force would be in a loop manner that merges the sequentially repeated series of the moment and acts with beauty, make-up and seduction. This is a performance from a series of works/gestures in which the artist applies and examines various make-up accessories on her body.

Fine-Tune| Single channel video| 9’02”| 2015

This video is built upon the performative possibilities of a wearable object. A corset is equipped with electronic circuits, rotating motors and drill & polish bits on its nipples: A seducing weapon and a daily wearable.

In this piece, the performer tries to fine-tune this object/device and use it accordingly.

Single-channel/Video / 12’:10”/ 2015

“Boundless Game” on one hand is an experimental dance and on the other hand can be read as movement study and the interrelation of bodies, objects and space. An object designed to be worn by performers. This wearable piece, which marks the borderline between the private and public is used as a vehicle to create a new dynamic for bodies on the conversation while it exoticizes and deforms body elements. The two are bound together through this vehicle which in its turn creates a boundless situation. Boundless Game is an attempt to portray this potential aspect of relationships in a playful, curious and improvised way.

Installation, Performance/ 2014

The “white paper plane” event is the first step towards building a bigger platform geographically diverse to help children affected by war. The white paper plan is a symbol of simple yet deep childhood joys. The artist hopes to use this symbol as a mean for dialogue.

In this exhibition, the artist`s work consists of a presentation and an event, explaining the project and its underlying primary platform, which followed by a collective performance.

Installation/ Fabric on Steel frames/ Dimensions: 26m. 3m. 2m/ Tehran|/2014

Reversed City is a grand urban installation containing 75 separate metal structures which have been covered by the fabric. It has been installed under one of the oldest well-known bridges in Tehran. Reversed City is a collective memory of the city which has been dematerialised into suspension and alienation. A traumatic red image of the city that floats above our heads.

Video Performance /4'20” /2013

This is a video piece from a series of works examining limits of the performer's body using various makeup accessories. In upper frame, A Red Lipstick is fixed of a surface and the performer in a semi-erotic ritual applies it on her lips, while she is keen to keep the eye contact with the viewer in the lower frame.

Single Channel Video/ HD/ 5’43”/ 2012

Irreversible Beauty is a video documentation of a performance experiment realized by the artist. A self-healing - self-destructing process which takes place in front of the camera as a witness.

The 15 min footage - which was shot without a cut- tries to keep the viewer engaged for the whole duration of the performance and make him/her witness to this traumatic process. The work challenges more than allegories that it reveals on its surface: a repeating act of wearing makeup, as a symbol of gender identity, shifts and transforms as works progress ahead, into layers deeper than what it represents at the first sight.

The sound and the image are going their own ways: to avoid stepping/ falling into a dramatic trap, both features are carefully chosen to be un-sync. The image ironically keeps its distant with the title of the video “Irreversible” as it goes back and the sound remains faithful to the truth, creating a loop which can go on forever in one’s mind.

More toward the end of the performance, few lines of dialogue between the performer and her crew bring the viewer back to reality, distancing him/her further from the so-called drama which it has been suggesting since the scratch.

Single Channel Video /HD /5’ /2011

Private Desires is a video piece based on the performing characteristics of Wearable Sculptures. The video explores the ambiguity of human relations, hierarchy, violence and power structures in everyday life

The works in this series—The Wearable Sculptures—include a set of objects conceived to generate a period of intimate contact with the body of their users—who may be the audience of the work or the performer who is to exhibit the mechanism that follows each object. This mechanism alludes to certain qualities of social interaction and how people get engaged in forming subject-to-subject relationships. In another sense, the action that evolves through an engagement with these objects tends to expose qualitative positions within the contours of which particular subjects happen to get entangled when engaged in social relations. Although such positions may apparently touch on issues with some degrees of specificity, they can be expanded into situational modes of interaction in general. The Wearable Sculptures are pathologies of socialism crafted and embodied as instrumental means that go on to initiate performative moments for elaborating on the modes of socialism and the subjectivities that they bring about.

Urban experiences| Performance| 2015-16

For this project, the artist involves in some public and social engagement practices. During this practice, she intervened the space and its psychology with some physical and symbolic mechanisms. With the notion of "embodied knowledge" in the background, she tried to link socially engaged art to performance art and gestures, recognizing that knowledge is inseparable from one lived, physical and social experience.