Pegah Bahador
This map is drawn as a navigation tool for a speculative meadow that lives in front of a friend’s house.
The scans show an attempt to navigate by the gesture of folding.
Folding as a physical and conceptual operation models how memory, desire, and spatial experiences are layered.
I practice doori o doosti, a Farsi idiom that translates literally to ‘distance and friendship’ and emphasizes how the two coexist and (even) sonically intertwine.
This epistolary practice involves the use of formal properties of letters and telephony to create and exchange meaning, and is itself a type of correspondence between myself and my subjects.
Displacement and epistolary necessitate one another, for distance and absence drive them both.
However, by addressing someone in an epistle, an illusion of presence is created that hovers in the pieces.
As a result, address is not just a problem but the problematic of my practice.
Addressing as a gesture, as well as seeking and returning, are assemblages that are caught in collective and therefore structurally political.
I work through montages of pieces and mediums to translate inaccessible places into tangible material ones.
I pay attention to borders—geographical and political, between fiction and theory, and within drawing.
I center forms of communication shaped by conditions of vulnerability and oppression: in double consciousness, with double voices.
I write with two voices and yearn with two hearts. I exist in two sites and record both.
It is in this practice that I collapse into one—this practice demonstrates dislocation but locates me as the author.
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Pegah Bahador (b. 1998, Tehran) practices doori o doosti, a Farsi term that translates to ‘distance and friendship,’ and emphasizes how the two coexist and (even sonically) intertwine. This epistolary practice suggests writing as an act in translation, or with an accent; and is itself a type of correspondence between them and their subjects. They work between sculpture, drawing and text to emphasize ground and language displacement. They earned their BFA at Tehran University of Art and are currently pursuing their MFA in Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University.
