Between a Lost Home and A Losing Destination 2020-2021 computer animation, sound
6 min 21 secs   The Precious Pain  2020-2021 computer animation, sound 3 min 56 secs  

 

Days pass by on me as I try to cope with what it means to live and be from two enemy states. In the past several decades, a series of assaults carried back and forth between the U.S. and Iran, each coated with crude rhetorical justifications, has laid out a political landscape that the Iranian diaspora cannot escape: It is our contemporary history. This history has created an exceedingly terrifying binary that we have to face without a choice. What remains is a matter of different forms of rejection or hesitant longing and embracement. The political predicament that has emerged between Iran and the U.S. has displaced and destabilized the lives of many. The best resolution given to this condition is under the definition of exile, which has evolved, immersed, and expanded in various shapes and discourses. My motivations as an artist, given my current conditions, are based on the urgency to understand and articulate my own exile and that of the Iranian identity in this context—affected by sanctions, war, and economic distress.

 

Illya Mousavijad is an emerging, multidisciplinary, conceptual artist born and raised in Isfahan, Iran. He received his BFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and his MFA at Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. His art practice investigates the limits and extents of exile, border and identity politics, Middle Eastern history, exile literature, US and Iran relations. He works across varied media including installation, painting, video, and computer animation. He has collaborated with international artists of various disciplines and exhibited in Iran and the US.