Zahrasadat Hakim (IR)
Residency period: September-November 2024
Living and working in Geneva since 2011, visual artist Zahrasadat Hakim (born in 1983 in Iran to Iraqi/Iranian parents) is an MA graduate in Contemporary Artistic Practices (Work.Master) from HEAD – Genève. Having lived through the conflict between Iran and Iraq during the first years of her life, her personal experience and her view of the world are strongly marked by the memory of the war and the many displacements that followed. Self-taught in her artistic practice, Hakim explores questions of belonging, resistance, continuity, care, and femininity through her memories, dreams, and observations. Using different media such as ceramics, painting, and weaving, her installations mostly articulate objects and artifacts in places that she arranges to imagine a new living space, benevolent and secure but doomed to disappear.
Her work has been showcased in numerous group exhibitions, including at the United Nations Office in Geneva (2017), Monnaie de Paris (2022), and Art au Centre in Geneva (2022). Her first solo exhibition J’ai vu une femme qui battait la lumière dans un mortier was presented at the Cherish art space in Geneva in 2022.
Continuing her research, observations, and experiments on the central role of community as a vector of reality and experience, Hakim wishes to develop a research project dealing with the notions of exchange and mutualization, drawing as much on the natural environment of the residency as on conversations with the other residents of La Becque. During her residency, Hakim will also take advantage of La Becque’s ceramic workshop to build an installation of ceramic tiles representing a phantasmagorical garden, alongside an experimental sound work constituting a highly personal narrative. Composed of the hazy sounds of her memories of the war, this materialization of her dreams will attempt to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality.