Goodarznezhad is the co-founder of two Ontario-based QTBIPOC collectives, Komite and Displaced collective, and throughout their operation since 2019, he has curated, promoted and showcased works by different artists as well as his own work. He is currently active at UKAI Projects as Prototyping Lead. Reflecting on growing up in Iran and immigrating to Canada in 2015, his work deals with concepts of displacement, repression, alienation, memory, and censorship. He looks to explore the subjective complexities of being an individual living in a society that forces you to behave in ways sanctioned by those who hold power.
Kasra Goodarznezhad
(Re)tracing : Explorations in Counter Cartography
Five overlaid maps drawn on transparent paper
"With my upbringing in post-war Iran, and also being an immigrant to Canada, I have been taught to embrace nostalgia and melancholia. I have flirted with feelings of regret and fomo all my life and always will. This research project is an attempt to map memories and places that I am not able to walk on anymore or even if I can, trying to map its relevance with the passage of time. Maps are made and used for a reason. Reasons like situating someone, navigating in a space, etc.
The user of the maps, activates the maps by passing through/over the places that those maps show. But what is a map good for if you can’t use it? What does a map do if it is not accurate at all, and it is incomplete? What do a series of incomplete and inaccurate maps do when they are overlaid on top of one another? For the next step of this project I will be working with Artificial Intelligence and making maps using Neural Networks."
– Kasra Goodarznezhad
About the artist
Kasra Goodarznezhad
Goodarznezhad is the co-founder of two Ontario-based QTBIPOC collectives, Komite and Displaced collective, and throughout their operation since 2019, he has curated, promoted and showcased works by different artists as well as his own work. He is currently active at UKAI Projects as Prototyping Lead. Reflecting on growing up in Iran and immigrating to Canada in 2015, his work deals with concepts of displacement, repression, alienation, memory, and censorship. He looks to explore the subjective complexities of being an individual living in a society that forces you to behave in ways sanctioned by those who hold power.
