Parisa's Artist Statement

Parisa Ghaderi

Artist statement

Two Suitcases, all the money you have saved, your loved ones, tears, those who can not come with you, those who always stay on the other side... and then you are going to completely disappear...

There is a quote by Emily Dickinson which says “death and distance are the same. Once you are gone, you are gone.”

Distance is physical, emotional, and psychological. It falls into all sorts of categories, but I want to add my new ones: paralyzing, heartbreaking, numbing, and nauseating. You feel it every time you are not understood, or when your communication abilities fail. And then you realize all you have heard about being just one phone call away, is a big lie. 

For me, it is the emotional and psychological aspect of distance, which is intriguing. When home is where you never are, when you get used to things you were afraid of. When you become numb, and oblivion becomes part of your everyday life, and when you lose control over hours and miles.

I’m interested in experiences and stories. When I have to trust my ears more than my eyes. Through my work, I try to connect, transform, communicate and exchange. I want to explore how distance affects people from different ethnicity and how they deal with it. I want to discover how they survive this forever waiting and how they manage their negative presence in their families.

For me, the saddest thing is one-way ticket. When I only leave but god knows when I come back. I’m interested in pauses when I am asked if I stay or leave. I like that hesitation. It shows that something has changed inside me.

It is through blogs, books and interviews that I find out the language for distance. I like to see how people create their own means of communication when it comes to nostalgia. For me, language plays a huge role in transforming my ideas into visual experience. I have passed all those dark moments when I have stumbled over a word or a phrase, or I heard chuckles because of mispronunciations. I am used to hear that everything is always all right on the other side, although they suffer and die.

Loss comes with distance, not only the physical loss but also the emotional disassociation with people and places. It feels strange to go back and realize that it doesn’t look like to what I have lived with, all these years, in my imagination.

Denial is another part of being distant. There are always small things you don’t want to change although you have become resilient. You just don’t want to turn everything into the new experience. You want to resist transforming. Then comes loneliness and solitude. Loneliness makes you strange and your strangeness makes you lonelier. You want to attach to your roots while being uprooted.

When I left, I didn’t have a clue of what to expect and how deal with all these changes. I’m still not sure how to express being inaccessible. When I left, I couldn’t think of a poem or a word to describe how it feels to leave, however, I love this poem by Rachel Wetzsteon which has masterfully reflected on all those mixed feelings about going to unknown.

High above the city, my lips are frozen shut, but my mind is saying, come on and turn your head, and the rest will follow.

Stay where you are, but realize what I went through.

There was so much mist between the dark streets and the familiar landing,

That I never got the views I wanted.