Received Sylff fellowship in 2013.
Academic supervisor: Professor Terri Warpinski
Current affiliation: Adjunct Faculty
Bahram received an MFA and also a graduate certification degree from the New Media and Culture program at the University of Oregon in 2015. His work and research has been supported by grants and awards from the Tokyo Foundation for International Research, Ford Alumni Center, University of Oregon and Society for Photographic Education. In 2009 he founded an international art group called Global Mission of Art which is a consortium of more than thirty artists from various nations of the world. In collaboration with non-profit and humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF and UNHCR, this group conceives and deploys its research-based projects to set up a variety of art based events.
Born in Iran, a society with stringent regulatory control over all types of communication, I developed a profound desire to understand how the performance of actions and the relationship between medium and message could affect the outcome of our social encounter.
My recent practice revolves around the idea of ‘affirmative destruction’ and negating the peripheral relationship between medium and message. In my works, destructed medium appears as a cultural object that is not self-sufficient or merely related to the archaeology of its existence but rather to the contingency of its reception within the space.
The Sylff fellowship facilitated a project in 2015 called Reversality. In collaboration with the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights in United Nations (OHCHR), this project proposed a sequential outline in three phases by inviting 15 international artists from different cultures to work on the idea of self-identification. According to OHCHR, self-determination is a newly enforced human right, which is evidenced by providing indigenous peoples with the option to state and freely choose what indigenous group they belong to. The concept of self-determination would be a key theme to articulate some of the contemporary critical theories regarding the disintegrated relations between cultural representation and self-identity caused by globalization. By addressing this fact, our project resulted in a book publication on April 21, 2015. The first edition was available for a limited time as a Paperback and as a Hardcover book publication.
www.farhadbahram.com
