Erfan Ghiasi is an Iranian multi-disciplinary artist and researcher working across photography, installation, video art, public art, and performance. Leaving Iran to pursue his MFA in the United States and living under new cultural and political conditions prompted him to reassess the function of art and the ways an artwork can be critical of the prevailing systems of political power and shed light on underlying ideologies. Inspired by Object-Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism, his artistic practice is driven by an interest in objects and their relation to the hegemon within different societies and cultures. He draws attention to the cryptic superstructures and raises questions about various social, cultural, political, and ecological issues. He currently lives in Iran and teaches a variety of courses relating to aesthetics, contemporary philosophy, and interventionist art.
Articles
A for Apparatus: Pejman Foundation, Ten Years Later
“One does not walk into a thicker cultural fog of false alternatives than what we are already in. But as Ferrer suggests, the mission is to freeze the fog and break it into pieces. So as to pick up the shattered bits and inspect them more closely. But also to neutralize the medium of deflection… Read More »
The Weird Elephant
For Object-Oriented Philosophy, there is no direct access to the outside reality. Instead, this access is indirect, allusive, or vicarious. Since traditional Islamic thought is not strange to OOP, this text uses Rumi’s fable “Elephant in the Dark” to place the use of metaphoric language in a central means of the technology of speculation so crucial for… Read More »