Thursday March 24 from 4-7pm and Friday March 25 from 2-7pm

Come visit the artists-in-residence Fatemeh Kazemi and Zelikha Zohra Shoja to interact with ephemeral, participatory installations. Fatemeh and Zelikha are interested in food rituals, communal gatherings, and collective memories. The participatory installation involves grapes adorning the ceiling and walls of their shared studio during their time at Rhizome DC. Grapes are an integral part of Fatemeh’s art practice as representative of her body, while Zelikha is interested in the process of grape preservation through burial practices. Their interest in grapes is interconnected with the notion of transformation. The installation explores the potential of foodways as energetic activations in domestic sites.

We invite the local community to explore the body with us.

Artist biographies: 
Fatemeh Kazemi فاطمه کاظمی (b. 1992, Tehran) is a Syracuse-based artist and co-founder of ROSVAÂ Magazine, pursuing her practice in multidisciplinary arenas to merge her different interests in different projects. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Painting at the University of Tehran. Recently, she is studying for a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art at Syracuse University.

Fatemeh’s approach is focused on the process and context of creation, to spotlight the very period during which the work was built. She employs an amalgamation of media such as video, installation, writing, and performance that serve as research into themes of ritual, subculture, and archival memory. Fatemeh uses a multitude of sources as a starting point, from theoretical text to a new word or memory, to weave together.

Instagram: @afimoh_____
Website: fatemehkazemi.com

Zelikha Zohra Shoja is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based on Onondaga land (Syracuse, New York). Her artistic practice is engaged in communal storytelling, grief-work, and post-memory, or the transmission of memory. Through performance, she re-stages and re-enacts moments towards an embodied archive. By playing with touch and emphasizing gesture through moving image, performance, and participatory installations, she explores how collective experiences can be transferred, mirrored, and felt by others. She is a co-stewardess of Stone Soups, a collective meal series throughout Central New York. She holds a BA in Diaspora Studies from George Mason University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University.

Instagram: @roschtve
Website: zelikhashoja.com