Rebecca Moradalizadeh
Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto
Rebecca Moradalizadeh (b.1989, London), a Portuguese-Iranian visual artist, performer and art educator, lives and works in Porto. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. She has a master’s degree in Artistic Studies – Museological and Curatorial Studies and a degree in Fine Arts – Multimedia from the same institution. She attended the Erasmus Program in Fine Arts Context and Practice at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, United Kingdom. Since 2010 she has been developing her artistic practice exploring performance art, video art, installation, photography and gastronomy, focusing on issues such as identity, gender, migration, territory, memory, family, archives and traces. In 2015, she began ‘LandMarks Series’, an ongoing autobiographical research project about her Iranian origins. The highlights of this project include the Reclamar Tempo research grant (1st edition) and an artistic residency opportunity at the Paulo Cunha e Silva Campus promoted by Teatro Municipal do Porto (2020-21); the acquisition of the photographic diptych ‘LandMarks #3. 1 – the process’, selected by the Acquisitions Project – PLÁKA to be part of the Porto Municipal Collection of Contemporary Art and its presentation in the group exhibition ‘Derivas e Criaturas’ at the Porto Municipal Gallery (2022); the solo exhibition ‘Behind the Veil’ curated by Melissa Rodrigues at Rampa – Porto (2022). In 2023, she was selected by BJCEM – Biennale des jeunes créateurs de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée to be part of the working group ‘BOW #2 – Bodies of work’ and to present her work at Dancehouse Lefkosia, Nicosia, Cyprus. Following her research, between 2023 and 2024, she joins Roxanna Albayati and Golara Khalilinejad to co-create the project ‘Seh Khak – Three Lands’, awarded the Criatório – PLÁKA creation grant resulting in a performance and exhibition at CRL-Central Elétrica and Espaço Mira, Porto.
Theses title
In search of an Identity through the Iranian Diaspora. A transcultural in-between vision, from the performative body
FCT reference
2024.01088.BD
Abstract
The project is presented as a research project in art, with a focus on artistic practice, related to issues such as identity, migration and displacement, arising from the Iranian diaspora and, consequently, from the political and social transformations that took place between the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and contemporaneity. Developed by revisiting my personal experience as a Portuguese-Iranian post-migrant citizen and critically analyzing literature, institutional and private archives, micro-histories of the Iranian diasporic community and the artistic practice of visual artists, the aim is to conduct a cross-cultural study on the relationship between the two territories to which I belong: Portugal-Iran and West-East. From a perspective of “in-between” displacement, the speculative-experimental work will result in the identification, problematization and confrontation of diasporic repercussions, denouncing conceptual problems of Westernism and Orientalism, associated with oppression, discrimination, stereotyping and fetishization felt in both societies.
Supervision
Gabriela V. Pinheiro (supervisor) and Fereshte Sadat Moosavi Jafari (co-supervisor)
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