Multiple award-winning artist, Gita Hashemi’s experimental transmedia practice encompasses work that draws on visual, media, performance, site specific and live art strategies. Exploring social relations and the interconnections of language and culture, Hashemi’s work is centered on marginalized histories and contemporary politics, often with an eye on women’s experiences. She draws on written text as premise for elaborate and large-scale multi-platform projects that blur the boundaries between artistic practices. A highly trained calligrapher, she often uses the writing process as live performance and/or visual material in video, installation, image-text and net art production. Recent themes include decolonial acts and cultures of resistance, from 18th century East-West encounters and the 1953 coup in Iran, to the 1979 Revolution as well as Indigenous land rights in Palestine and Turtle Island. She is concerned with individual healing and social transformation, and her work often engages the viewers directly through interactive and participatory processes. Most recently, her project “Grounding” was selected as the best exhibition of 2017 by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries.
She originated the maxim, “the personal is poetic, the poetic is political, the political is personal.”