Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist known for assuming multiple identities. Her official press releases and gallery biographies conflict on country of origin, date of birth, and place of residence.
Her work is primarily concerned with investigating the structural underpinnings and relationships of complicity between the respective complexes of
politics,
commerce and industry, and in turn, their roles in dictating the shape and structure of
mundane life. Haghighian creates solo and collaborative works in the fields of installation, performance, text, and sound.
Haghighian's “Pssst Leopard 2A7+”, an ongoing investigation into the German-made
Leopard 2A7+ battle tank (designed for urban use, to “pacify” rioters or protesters) has been widely exhibited since it was first conceived in 2013. The audio sculpture covered with a blue, green and grey camouflage pattern of
Lego
Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlocking ...
baseplates was described as a sardonic travestying of the Leopard Tank.
Her collaborations are often of an ongoing, open-ended/cumulative nature. For instance, in 2010, in collaboration with writer/researcher/curator Ashkan Sepahvand, Haghighian founded the Institute for Incongruous Translation in order to support discord and negotiation in translation.
Haghighian rejects the totalizing ideas of
CVs
CVS may refer to:
Organizations
* CVS Health, a US pharmacy chain
** CVS Pharmacy
** CVS Caremark, a prescription benefit management subsidiary
* Council for Voluntary Service, England
* Cable Video Store, former US pay-per-view service
* CVS F ...
,
resumes, and
bios
In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the ...
, and insists that only biographies obtained from bioswop project be used in printed material regarding her work. Thus, the whole idea of a cogent narrative summary of his/her/their personal biography and artistic output is
anathema to his/her/their assumed political and/or artistic
ideals
Ideal may refer to:
Philosophy
* Ideal (ethics), values that one actively pursues as goals
* Platonic ideal, a philosophical idea of trueness of form, associated with Plato
Mathematics
* Ideal (ring theory), special subsets of a ring considered ...
. Given that any reference information on any media platform concerning Haghighian has been appropriated from the bioswop project, the only externally verifiable fact concerning Haghighian and his/her/their artistic output in this Wikipedia entry is that her two-channel video projection ''Empire of the Senseless Part II'' (2006) is in the permanent collection of the
Museum of Modern Art.
Haghighian was chosen to represent Germany at the 2019
Venice Biennale. She created the persona of Natascha Süder Happelmann for public aspects of the installation and wore a mask during the
press conference announcing the nomination. As the artist's representative, Helene Duldung read a statement and answered questions on her behalf.
References
Further reading
*
External links
Interview with Natascha Sadr-Haghighian on artistic researchInterview on the making of the sound installation 'De paso' at La Capella MACBA (2011)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Haghighian, Natascha Sadr
Living people
1987 births