Meet: Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson (WA) 💥

Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson is an Iranian Australian Bahá’í video artist, director and researcher. Her practice navigates inherited stories and post-memory felt by her displaced community following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Through the poetics of the moving image, she invites viewers to become the ‘witness’ rather than the ‘passive bystander’, inviting a critical discussion surrounding empathy, trust, custodianship, compassion, and social change in response to the current global social and climate discourse. Her practice values align to empower the voices of women within her art making. Working in community arts and collaborative social practice, she examines empathy in film and poetry, uncovering ways to build empathy through emotional immersive experiences in order to close the gaps in finding the universal threads of culture, social, gender and spirituality that unite us all.

What are you working on right now?

“I am working on this new project exploring the deeply spiritual processes in meditative labour and collaborative practise, unravelling a mystical and poetic epic, called the Seven Valleys. With a focus on sensory experience and extended Reality art-making, my investigation will focus on the ways to witness the unseen through emotional immersion.”

For twenty years Kickstart has worked with early-career artists, inspiring them to create their most ambitious work to date, presented at Next Wave Festival in Melbourne. Alongside our plans for 2022 and beyond, we reconsider and reinvent what our legacy commissioning and artist development program could be.

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Image 1: Colour portrait of Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson