Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson in Victoria Park
Artist: Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson (She/Her)
Work: (our home) خونۀ ما
(2022 - 2023)
Location: Victoria Park, Western Australia
Community partner: Victoria Park Community Centre
About the artist:
Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson (b. Boorloo, Perth, 1996) is an award-winning Iranian Australian Bahá'í video artist, researcher, and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her research navigates the sharing of stories, understanding its essential role in healing and mental wellbeing in response to traumatic contexts. Working in multi-channel video art installations, she intersects theatrical and cinematic performance with film-poetry, archives and sound, seeking to document, as a witness, cultural stories that transcend beyond a locality into the human condition. Navigating the aesthetic and artistic devices of storytelling and world-building via the moving image, this informs her own perception on how we can facilitate emotional wellbeing in individuals and communities. Uplifting shared voices can transform how we think, feel, perceive, and interpret some of the harshest conditions humans face in conflict, revolution, war and now pandemic. Currently, her practice is intending to navigate how feminine approaches within art-making can be harnessed to mediate conflict. Through emotional immersion in new digital media, she addresses the act of preservation; preserving collective memory over a silent genocide, uncovering home in the face of placelessness, empowering communal love in the face of apathy, and understanding connection whilst we welcome the discomfort of disconnection.
Elham Eshraghian–Haakansson, Asha Kiani with the Second Generation Collective, Áshená, Bear Witness to Me, 2021, multi- channel installation, 4K video with sound, 25:00. Acknowledgements to Lotterywest’s Community Arts Network Dream Plan Do ’20, City of Fremantle, Propel Youth Arts WA, University of Western Australia School of Design, Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, Amped Digital, Englisifarsi and Centre for Stories.