Anahita Norouzi: It Looks Nice from a Distance

Anahita Norouzi, Our Perfect Lawn (installation detail). Image courtesy of the artist.

Anahita Norouzi: It Looks Nice from a Distance

March 25 – May 6, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, March 25, 7 PM – 9 PM
Free to attend and all are welcome!
TRUCK Contemporary Art, Calgary

We are delighted to present Anahita Norouzi’s multi-media installation, It Looks Nice from a Distance, in the Main Space from March 25 – May 6, 2023.

It Looks Nice from a Distance takes the form of a twelve-channel video installation (presented on television monitors), incorporating text, sound, video, and sculpture. It explores the themes of otherness and displacement by paralleling the notions of migration and tourism, shedding light on the gap between these two realities.

The video in the background shows images of “the influx of border crossings” recorded in 2016 by the artist after “more than 700,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean”. Superimposed on these videos are live streaming of surveillance footage from deserted beaches in Europe–located on the Mediterranean migration routes–following the closure of borders linked to the health crisis due to the pandemic.

Here, through a meditative exercise, she invites the viewers to reflect on the different experiences of border, belonging, and otherness in order to recontextualize the notion of displacement at the present time.

Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist, originally from Tehran and active in Montreal since 2018. She holds advanced degrees in Fine Arts and Graphic Design from Concordia University in Montreal. For the past 4 years, she has been traveling often between Iran and Canada to conduct her research which lies at the intersection of colonial histories, experiences of immigration and displacement, and the issue of identity and memory.

Her practice is research-driven, instigated by marginalized histories and the legacies of botanical explorations and archeological excavations, particularly when scientific research became entangled in the colonial exploitation of non-Western geographies. Articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, and video, her work interrogates different cultural and political perspectives on the human and non-human “other,” underlining the complex space between conflicted state of displaced people, plants, and cultural artifacts, and the responsibilities of the host country.

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