ANOUSHA MOHTASHAMI: CONSTRUCTING EMBODIMENT
What does it mean to be perverse?
The way women are often reduced to objects of desire in a system that strips them of their autonomy and authentic existence. It's a form of dehumanization that forces them to externalize themselves, to become something consumable rather than someone fully embodied.
What does embodiment feel like?
Embodiment feels like a kind of dissociation, a melting into matter, one with another—giving bodies, taking bodies, claiming the organic to feel alive. It’s creating the skin we inhabit, becoming one with others. For me, embodiment is our collective memory—memories of our mothers, our sisters, distant but still here, metaphysically and even organically present in our unconscious. In my work, I constantly find myself grappling with the idea of having a body—or more specifically, constructing one. It's a pendulum swing between identification and psychology. What’s interesting is that, when I first started art school, I was obsessed with creating matter: biomatter, artificial organic effects, textures that felt alive, and somehow always tied to the idea of a body. Years later, I realized that I needed a body to feel alive inside, but it wasn’t my own. Unconsciously, I had been trying to create a body for myself to inhabit—a new form where I could truly exist.
( In a way, my work has become a series of indirect self-portraits. But it’s more than just my story. Being a woman from Iran, there’s this collective gaze we have on our bodies, shaped by culture, history, and the pressures we navigate. That gaze finds its way into my art, weaving together personal and shared memories, constructing bodies that aren't just mine but also reflect the experiences of other women like me. My art is my way of negotiating that relationship between the body and identity, between what’s personal and what’s shared, between what we hide and what we reveal.)
What's your 5 hour plan?
To be honest, my favorite 5-hour plan could be doomscrolling or blowing glass non-stop.
How do you self censor?
I believe that self-censorship is even my method of working. I have a horror of figuration, and abstraction is my safest zone. My brain always twists what I want to say into something else so that I don’t say it, and that’s where my forms are born.
What does being aasi mean to you?
I know i'm Assi when my estomac and back hurts at the same time. and my body tells me to stop. Cuz my mind can go and go and go deep to the perversity of continuing to be Assi.
More Anousha here.
