it cannot be called travelling

Abstract

MFA Thesis Abstract it cannot be called travelling Negar Tajgardan I moved from Tehran to Saskatoon in 2016 to attend graduate school at the University of Saskatchewan. Over the course of the past two years of the MFA program, I developed my works through exploring my experience of displacement. As my ideas began to be reflected in my art making practices, I started to include other media such as photography, video, and performance into my preferred medium of sculpture-installation. Expanding the forms and presentation strategies of my work led me to delve deeper into my own memories as well as the broader concepts of immigration and displacement. The artwork in my MFA exhibition includes several bodies of work in a variety of media that address this topic. Change is an inevitable fact in everyone’s lives. Moving and immigration are examples of significant change; my intention in my artworks is to explore my own feelings of displacement. My current concerns probe the memories of places where people have been living, the places that they left for different reasons. I became obsessed about working with the memories of absent objects, whether they were missed as a result of growing up, moving or even death. The memories of places we lived before make it hard to settle down elsewhere. Through my artwork, I have attempted to indicate the ideas of vulnerability and instability as a result of displacement and how they affect the quality of our lives. To point to the vulnerability in life, I chose paper, a fragile material, to represent this idea. I consider light in my works as a symbolic way to make memories alive again (Figure 1). Although my works started with my personal life, my hope is that my artworks can spark viewers’ own memories and can help them imagine my life and that of others who have immigrated across cultures and boundaries. My art practice during my MFA started like a journey with my fragile paper backpacks as a metaphor of carrying memories and it led to my recent works which symbolically are connected to my current circumstances. My intention was to look at the broad concept of displacement within my own experiences, linking my intimate observations to my viewers through my artworks.