Ashkan Sepahvand (DE/US/IR, 1984)
Residency period: January-March 2027
Ashkan Sepahvand is an artist, writer, and researcher holding a PhD in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Born in Tehran and raised in Tulsa, he is now based between London and Berlin. His practice unfolds slowly, shaped by an interest in the relationship between words and bodies, and takes form through performances, publications, and collaborative frameworks.
Sepahvand has edited numerous volumes, including seeing studies (Hatje Cantz, 2012), Textures of the Anthropocene (The MIT Press, 2014), Elements for a World (Sursock Museum, 2016), and How to Die – Inopiné (Archive Books, 2022). With Natascha Sadr Haghighian, he co-founded the institute for incongruous translation, an ongoing framework for shared studies, and with Virgil B/G Taylor he forms ssssSssssssss, a collaborative study-friendship. In 2024, he premiered his first film, Seeking for Story.
During his residency at La Becque, Ashkan Sepahvand will develop a practice he calls “faggot-gathering”: the act of collecting and bundling loose sticks and branches from the land. This form of environmental labor becomes a metaphor for gathering and binding scattered histories of queer diasporic subjectivity. Through this process, he will trace connections between medieval energy regimes, early modern peasant economies, and contemporary identity politics, engaging with notions of the improper and the useless. The project will be documented in the form of a “commonplace book,” compiling notes and sketches into a “faggotological” anthology that reimagines movement, materiality, and ritual as acts of queer use.