Photo credit: Jason Haye

Shabnam Shabazi is a multi-disciplinary artist, an ‘artivist,’ with an archival practice. She works with object, video/digital media; text, performance, collage and installation. Participation and creating platforms to give voice to important issues, are all at the heart of Shabnam’s practice.  Shabnam’s work is autobiographical and archival, exploring notions of home, place, displacement, identity and the body. Shabnam will be presenting her work next month as part of Certain Blacks: Harlem, a new festival of performance at Rich Mix. Below she writes for Run Riot about her practice and specifically about ideas of archiving and notions of the body as a house.

My work comes from a very real place, real moments.... In 2003 my grandmother, who I was very close to, died and suddenly I was consumed by ‘archive fever’. As Jacques Derrida talks about: when you are dislocated and separated from your material reality and traditional family bonds, needing to dig up, excavate heritage, very much like an archaeologist.

I was a kid when I ended up in the UK, so I really had no idea why I was leaving my country of birth, as the decision was made by my family for me. You see, I came here with my family as political refugees from Iran at the age of 9 in 1979. There are a lot of 9s occurring in there if you’re into numbers.

My work does tend to explore notions of home, place, identity, and is a kind of exorcism. Wanting to banish and distance the past through re-enactments and rituals connected to my memories and personal history; a kind of playing it out as children do to banish the fear. My work explores the idea of death. It was death after all that brought me to the archive through catching archive fever... archiving as a kind of preservation of a moment of memory, a personal museum of displacement. Life casting was used to create death masks often adorning graves and burial grounds, taking a cast of the dead body as a remembrance.

So in 2003, I migrated from the medium of theatre to performance/live art as I was seeking new strategies to make a body of autobiographical work inspired from my own heritage. Now I realise that it was also about wanting to develop more of a visual language - wishing to embody these differences and moments of memory to come to terms with the loss and what happened. But this time coming to the self, as the first temple at the Oracle of Delphi was "Know Thyself".

I came from a background as a director of new, text based work, to then becoming the 'performer' of the work. As it was my personal story that I was wishing to tell, it made sense. I don't see myself as a performer but as an interdisciplinary creator of art works, solo and collaborative.

'Body House' (vers. ii) by Shabnam Shabazi from shabnam shabazi on Vimeo.

In this version of Body House (vers. iii), I am creating the image on another performer so I am once again stepping outside to let the director and performance artist hang loose and for the work to find a new lease of life as I hand over the central role to another performer.

Body House (vers. iii) is a contemporary performance exploring the idea of the body as a house, which I have had in my practice and in my daily life since 2012. My body is my house and I do yoga and more recently became vegan, so there is no end to the exploration of my body as my house artistically and practically.

I guess from making this piece of work, art imitated life and extended into life. I learn from the work I make, which is exploring fragments of my life, working with "my memories as my documents" as sculptor Louise Bourgeois talks about. Working with my own autobiography but essentially in a conceptual way. The last three pieces I’ve made are definitely a trilogy that speak to each other, and from doing all the performance works, I know clearly that I hope to be able to write an autobiographical book one day and that the performance works themselves have been an investigation of this.

What inspired 'Body House' as an image was that I had an epiphany, a moment of truth, when I realised that my body is my house, after years of asking ‘where is home?’ with my signature theme as 'home' since starting to make work from the age of 14.

My realisation was entirely experiential and coincidental at first. I was in LA interviewing family members as part of another arts project, an earlier trilogy, and whilst in my cousin's home office, found a dinky cardboard house which was almost like a hat so you could actually wear it. So I put it on my head and in that moment, I became ‘Body House'.

Photo credit: Jason Haye

The incredible thing is that at that moment I did not know anything about Louise Bourgeois's 'woman house’...it wasn't until later when I was doing my MA in Aural and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, that a close friend made me aware of Bourgeois's 'Femme Maison' images...

This moment in LA at my cousin’s house, is when I was meant to encounter Louise Bourgeois’s work. That's when I had my moment of truth that home cannot be a fixed geographical location for displaced people like me...that the only place to arrive at mid-career, mid-life is that my body is my house, arriving at the archetypal image of a woman with a house on her head.

Shabnam Shabazi 

Body House (vers III)

8 September, Rich Mix