OCAD University Open Research Repository

Carrying Distance

Kamgari, Abedar (2022) Carrying Distance. Masters thesis, OCAD University.

Item Type: Thesis
Creators: Kamgari, Abedar
Abstract:

Carrying Distance is a body of research in the form of visual artworks, performances, and writing that takes up the idea of distance as a poetic framework for approaching contexts and conditions of displacement and diaspora. I generate embodied knowledge through movement by performing live, collaborating with my family, and engaging in tactile and laborious making processes such as ceramics and natural dyes. The project is comprised of an exhibition of two curtains and two live performances, with a door and one of the curtains respectively. The hands-on making of the two curtains activates body memory and a meditative place for reflecting on diasporic entanglements. I position curtains as symbolic manifestations of sites where multiple distances converge, gesturing to borders shaped by geographies, cultures, languages, gender, and time. My door shape shifts into a diasporic in-between space: a threshold, a borderland, and a crossroads. Insisting on staying in this liminal doorway—as opposed to moving to a known destination beyond—represents a commitment to carrying embodied traces of many lives, making room for contradictions and unbelonging, and seeing what can be made of them. With Carrying Distance, I ruminate on what it means to inherit diasporic families and colonial ruins.

Date: 12 September 2022
Uncontrolled Keywords: Distance, diaspora, father and child, carrying, inheritances, borderlands, performance, doorways, thresholds, borders, intergenerational, body archives.
Divisions: Graduate Studies > Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design
Date Deposited: 12 Sep 2022 15:03
Last Modified: 22 Sep 2022 21:07
URI: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/3938

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