Lurking Variable !=

Bahareh Khoshooee

In my work I explore the underlying tension between reality and fiction, confabulation and manipulation, false memories and alternative facts. Our bodies and identities are documented by governments through a variety of tools including but not limited to biometrics, surveillance cameras, facial recognition, financial transactions, and online behavioral patterns. In my most recent body of work I explore the algorithms of oppression and examine the role of Capitalism in the very design of technology.

I use social media not only as a platform, but I deconstruct its visual language and utilize its limitations as a way of subverting the nature of virtual culture. I harvest personal memories and cultural references (both Iranian and American) as the raw material for creating hybrid characters and fabricated circumstances. with the use of technology, glitch, repetition, a maximal aesthetic, and due to the free-floating absence of the referent, my video-installations and performances feel strangely familiar yet foreign, seducing the viewer into a pleasurable state of disorientation and information fatigue.

PORTFOLIO

Press & Reviews

“Khoshooee’s object, taking notes from Khan’s text, encourages the viewer to speculate on what a reconciliation between cyberspace and the human mind, one which approaches a more egalitarian way of seeing, might look like.” — Amanda Roach
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“The mundanity of her words — “If I’m being honest with you, I think this baby, um, is my baby” — is set against the extravagant aesthetics of cyberspace. It’s Big Brother filtered through New Wave futurism, at once boring and visually rich, and it’s a perfect fit for an exhibition about the uncanny and the mundane.” — Laura Hutson Hunter
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