Anahita Razmi
Goethe@LUX Residency Artist 2018
The Goethe@LUX Residency artist 2018 was Anahita Razmi. The Berlin-based artist works mainly with video, installation, new media and performance to deal with cultural transfers and translocations.
Anahita Razmi examines processes of cultural appropriation in which the meanings of existing images, artefacts and thus identities are altered by situating them in another temporal context. In doing so, she often reflects strategies of disarrangement and structures of perception expressed by the mass media of consumer and pop culture against the background of different communities between the West and the Middle East. The Islamic Republic of Iran, with its current political and social conditions and relations, remains an open, ambivalent point of reference.
In 2017, Razmi received a BS Projects scholarship at Braunschweig University of Art, Germany. Other residencies and awards include the Werkstattpreis of the Erich Hauser Foundation (2015), the MAK-Schindler Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program, Los Angeles (2013) and the The Emdash Award, Frieze Foundation (2011).
During the residency Razmi worked on a project entitled THE FUTURE STATE which considers the future state of The Islamic Republic of Iran, as seen from the perspective of a diverse range of diasporic political communities. The project had been developed with reference to the work of Iranian Marxist Mansoor Hekmat who is buried in close proximity to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. Hekmat was a theorist, revolutionary and leader of the Iranian worker-communist movement, active in Iran until 1981 and outside the country, in Kurdistan and the UK, afterwards until his death in 2002.
The residency was organised in the context of the bicentenary of Karl Marx’s birth, who is buried close to LUX in Highgate Cemetry.
More information:
Interview with Anahita Razmi.In this video, the artist speaks about her residency in London:
A collaboration between LUX and the Goethe-Institut London.
Back to the site "Residencies"