Welcome to the opening of Hoda Siahtiri's first solo exhibition, an audiovisual installation with life-size (self-)portraits and the near-forgotten lamentations of Bakhtiari mothers.
OPENING NIGHT
FR 04.02 16:00 - 23:00
OPENING HOURS
WE - FR 13:00 - 17:00
SA 14:00 - 20:00
EXPO VISIT WITH THE ARTIST
SA 12.02 15:00
The space holds a series of life-size photographs and a sound composition that convey the patterns and rhythms of lamentation. Laments often accompany the process of mourning with music, song and poetry. No Body’s Body is a reflection and an embodiment of mourning in the form of a lament, where individual and collective memories come together in a practice of healing.
Hoda's own body is also part of her research. In a series of photographic portraits, she poses in various outfits illustrating different phases in a person’s life and in the unfolding of historical periods. The pictures blend with the uncanny atmosphere created by an immersive soundscape that represents ‘the song of the mothers’. It is a collection of sounds that draws on the tonalities of earth, water, minerals, alongside recordings of lamentations sung by Bahktiari women.
By wearing these traces of the past and using personal sound recordings, the artist becomes herself a living archive and a body of transmission. She performs a practice of "auto-ethnography", claiming the codes of ethnography - a discipline that has a tradition of reducing, patronizing or labelling persons and communities as exotic - to tell her own story. Thus, No Body's Body invites us to enter a layered bodyscape of loss, healing and memory.
WHO?
Hoda Siahtiri is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. She would like to call herself a
diseuse, someone who narrates stories muted somewhere in the past. Hoda studied Cinema
in Tehran and holds a Documentary Film Directing master degree from Docnomads. She
has directed a number of short films shown in international festivals. In 2017, she joined the
artistic research platform a.pass and since then, she has been putting forward her ideas
through the medium of performance and audio-visual arts. She has performed in different
venues including the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts and BOZAR. Since 2020, she is a
PhD researcher at Sint Lucas Antwerpen and University of Antwerp where she is working on
her project Singing The Silences .
https://www.instagram.com/siahtiri.hoda/
Photo credit: Manuel Bischof
