Aghigh Afkhami
MFA ’25 Photography
Gallery Assistant
Recognize (2021) is a video work that examines repetition, identity, and the instability of perception within virtual environments. The work proposes that recognition is produced through looping and repetition, where events continuously fold into one another, suggesting that what exists before and after the loop is never fully visible. Within this structure, distinguishing truth from the virtual becomes impossible, as the subject attempts to recognize itself through it own image but remains caught within a recursive system of confusion and misalignment.
In relation to the theme of Glitch Ecology, I revisited this work five years after its initial creation. This return created a shifted understanding of both its conceptual and formal qualities, as well as of my own artistic practice over time. Encountering the work after several years felt like engaging with an earlier version of myself, positioning the piece as a dialogue between past and present states of practice.
This temporal distance revealed changes in my approach to making, structure, and conceptual framing, allowing the work to exist simultaneously as both familiar and distant. The installation for this presentation reinforces this condition through a deliberately minimal and exposed setup, using a simple found monitor with visible cabling. The work is placed at ground level, requiring the viewer to look downward, framing the video as something fragile, residual, or “expired” within the context of my current practice.
Rather than concealing its infrastructure, the installation exposes it, emphasizing a tension between process and finished work, as well as between past authorship and present reinterpretation. In this sense, the work becomes a space of in-betweenness, where an earlier video is reactivated through the lens of a changed practice, while still retaining its original instability, uncertainty, and conceptual openness.
Aghigh Afkhami (b. 1996, Tehran; based in Boston) is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, video, and bookmaking. Her practice explores memory, resilience, and fragmentation through narrative and sequencing. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Afkhami’s photobooks Salakhi (2024, with Amir Esfandiari) and Stress (2024) have been presented at international art book fairs including Miss Read (Berlin) and the LA Art Book Fair (Los Angeles). Her work has been exhibited in Iran, the United States, and the UAE, and she was a finalist in the 19th Arte Laguna Prize (Venice).
