Pegah Bahador
I use text, images, and drawings as a container for my motivations, and as a vessel that poses questions around what it means to be seen or to feel seen, what it means for one to go invisible, and how invisibility and empty space can serve as a space of resistance. Information is fragile and slippery. I think about how access to information can be obscured, and then reformed; what it means to go invisible, or to witness loss and disappearance. Image-making is a hiding game. I focus on how formal decisions and aesthetic choices carry the politics of loss, grief, and visibility.
Through Permadeath, I focus on the produced aesthetics of first-person shooter video games to convey violence. The death or killing of a character in its most extreme form. In this series of images, the red blood overlay that envelopes the frame becomes a filter to shoot everyday life through. Life that is inseparable from pain, and is mediated by it.
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Pegah Bahador / Dejavu.Simulator (b: 1998, Tehran, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with language, image, and video to focus on lost intimacy, pain, and yearning. Woven together from and with holes, her work deals with ghosts, instructions, loss, and friendship. Currently, they are in Chicago, pursuing their MFA in ‘Art, Theory, Practice’ at Northwestern University.
