Elika Hedayat

Exhibited Artist

Elika Hedayat (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran) has studied at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, at Annette Messager’s Studio, and also at Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts. She often uses testimonies and experimental documentaries, staged in a dreamlike, imaginary universe. Her stories are contemporary and her characters are real. All of her works revisits historical references, transferring them onto the field of personal experience, mainly using the various possibilities of her repertoire as a narrative document and memory retrieval tool. Reality, memory, and imagination come together in a personal story under different forms: drawing, video, documentary, painting, and performance. By utilizing these media, Elika creates an imaginary world that reflects a dominant system in search of a Utopia; a system fascinated by modernity, technology, and various media. In her works, we can see this ideological system becoming deformed, until it finds itself completely mutilated. Therefore, by treading tirelessly on a path to find this Utopia, her works reach a chaotic, grotesque world: a real dystopia. Her drawings are infused with irony, suggesting a contestation of the established order. Her works are falsely extravagant, designating a hybridity that has been an object of delectation and debate, pleasure and resistance in all ages. Hedayat lives and works between Paris and Tehran.

 

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