Studio Grant holder in Stockholm 1 November 2021 – 21 April 2022

Gothenburg-based artist Kasra Alikhani was born in Iran and raised in Sweden. Alikhani explores an expanded idea of stage design and amateur film. Through stagings he attempts to dramatise how uniformity/conformity is maintained and what is repressed by the pretence in the theatre of the everyday. Expressions borrowed from mass culture and documentary observations are woven together in order to inject the eerie, the playful and the absurd into that which feels familiar. The detour via fiction provides a distance from which Kasra Alikhani’s inner world can more easily seep in and end up in dialogue with the social reality he translates.

Antingen jag eller antigen, Kasra Alikhani. Photo: Cora Hillebrand

During his time at IASPIS, Kasra Alikhani will continue to investigate attitudes about illness and uniformity by exploring our relationship to pain. The project will start out from places for recuperation such as spas and gyms, which will be examined as echoes of health resorts and spas in Sweden, idealised landscapes, which, since the end of the 19th century, have been assigned healthy qualities. At the same time as the health resorts appeared, a nationalistic project was underway to formulate a homogenous idea of Sweden, which linked the Swedish landscape to both authentic Swedishness and well being. Which visual echoes exist between these places? What is repressed or lost in the pursuit of freedom from pain? What is the relationship between a desire for uniformity and health?

Kasra Alikhani studied Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. He has participated in the following exhibitions: Antingen jag eller antigen, Galleri Cora Hillebrand (2021); Future Watch, Stockholm House of Culture & City Theatre (2021); GIBCA extended, 3:e våningen, Gothenburg (2021); Five Corners, Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö (2021); Borås Art Museum (2021-2022); Analogue Funny Weather, Eldhunden, Stockholm (2020). Film screenings: Göteborg Film Festival (2019); Uppsala International Short Film Festival (2019); New York Indie Short Awards (2021); winner of best art film at Frame Film Festival (2019). Contributions to publications: Paletten no. 326 (2022), ABHIVYAKTI (2021), C-print: The Future Watch Issue (2021).