Gita Hashemi Residency

Gita Hashemi’s transmedia practice focuses on historical and contemporary issues. In 2013, her
solo exhibitions included Time Lapsed at A Space Gallery in Toronto and The Idea of Freedom at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), and she participated in The Third Space exhibition at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre as part of Tirgan Festival of Iranian Art and Culture. Drawing on visual, media and performance strategies and using different techniques and technologies, she explores social relations and the interconnections of writing as embodied language with cultural
imaginary and politics.
Her most recent projects include Headquarters; Pathology of an Ouster, a multi-platform work including an installation, performance and webcast focused on the 1953 US-UK coup d’etat in Iran; Utopias In-Progress, a performance, video and installation about the effects of capitalism on the arts; Ephemeral Monument , an embodied writing performance, video and installation based on the literature of resistance in Iran between the coup and the 1979 Revolution; and the
Book of Illuminations, a book/installation that draws on self-narrative and idiomatic Farsi to comment on repetitive political and cultural patterns. She is currently working on Passages, a series of live art performances and video installations that use embodied writing and reading to explore 16th -19th century travel literature.
She has exhibited, among other venues, at Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre/Toronto,Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts/San Francisco, SIGGRAPH/Los Angeles, Casoria Museum of Contemporary Art/Napels, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Rosario/Argentina, Plug In/Basel, Al Kahf Art Gallery/Bethlehem, Museo de Arte
Contemporaneo de Yucatan/Merida, Red House Centre/Sofia and Electrochoc/Lyon and in many new media and art festivals in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Her work has been reviewed in Mix Magazine, Art Papers, Abitaire, Fuse, Radical History Review, Leonardo, Art Week, Toronto Star, Canadian Dimensions, Eastern Art Report, DigiMag, and TeknoKultura among others. She is a recipient of
Baddek International New Media Award for the CD-R Of Shifting Shadows, Toronto Community Foundation Award for the
sound installation The War Primer, and American Ad Federation’s award for the book Locating Afghanistan. She has been awarded many art grants for her work by the Canada Council for theArts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.
Hashemi was born in Shiraz, Iran. She entered the School of Fine Arts at Tehran University in1979 but was expelled at the time of Islamic Cultural Revolution. She continued her education at California State University at Northridge, and later at York University where she graduated with a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies. She taught time-based art, (new) media and culturalstudies at York and Ryerson Universities and University of Toronto, 1998-2009. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

 2013 

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