July 7 – July 11, 2021
2021년 7월 7일 – 7월 11일
3-A Gallery, CICA Museum
Living in Between
“Living in between” is an interactive multimedia piece about changing the appearance of American
objects. These objects are pickle jars, pizza boxes, and lottery tickets. I have picked these objects from
my daily life to visually reflect my experience as an immigrant with them on to their physical surface. In
“Living in Between, “which contains three individual pieces, I am narrating my life as an immigrant in
the past, present, and future to convey the concepts of development, loneliness, and vulnerability.
These concepts expose my life as the result of living between two countries, which are Iran and the USA.
The USA is a diverse community, willing to accept different people from different cultures, but since the
2017 executive order, our life has been changed a lot. This phenomenon made me reconsider the
concept of home and my identity. Indeed, by introducing the life of immigrants via art, I help other
people to know and understand the immigrants better, especially in the USA, people need to live in
harmony with immigrants.
Also, due to socio-political issues, there are some specic stereotypical attitudes about immigrants. As
“Living in Between” is an interactive piece, it challenges some of these attitudes by providing a visual
atmosphere for audiences to imagine themselves as an immigrant and ask themselves this question;
what I would feel if I was an immigrant.
I started this project by researching how immigration and living between two countries/two cultures
can affect the feelings of people and their perspective toward life. I realized that immigration is not a
one-time action. It is a process that starts even before the immigrant starts to immigrate and will
continue to an innite future. During this process, the immigrant experiences diverse feelings like
development, loneliness, and vulnerability. To visualize these three feelings, I researched different
American objects and their symbolic meanings, both in American and Iranian culture. Finally, I picked
pickle jars, pizza boxes, and lottery tickets, because not only did those objects convey the feeling of
development, loneliness, and vulnerability in my personal life, but also, they could expose the concept
of passing the time.
For the rst piece, which is about the future, I brainstormed different fortunes that a single immigrant
could experience during immigration. I picked 20 of them, which were more critical. Then, I started to
visualize them in the form of some motion and static illustrations. In the same time, I researched
American lottery tickets to know how they worked and ended up with black and white cards with
scratch numbers. Finally, connect those numbers to the illustrations.
In the second piece, which is about the present, I illustrated my daily life and my interaction with food in
the form of a hand-made animation. I purchased dozens of blanked pizza boxes from a local pizza shop,
installed them on the wall, and projected my short animation on them. Indeed, I used pizza boxes as my
screen.
Finally, for the third piece that is about the past, I researched the developmental phases of a newborn
baby and I compared them to my developmental stages during the rst year of my immigration. I
illustrated each step and printed them in the form of small labels. I purchased 12 jars from different
local markets, removed their labels, and attached my labels to them.
Maryam Khaleghiyazdi, “Living in Between-Past”(2020)