Mahsa Foroughi
15 June – 15 November 2022
ARTIST BIO:
Mahsa Foroughi is a published Persian poet, filmmaker, critic and architect. She was awarded her PhD for interdisciplinary research on architecture, film and philosophy that questioned the status quo of humans’ perception. As an academic, she has been teaching architecture history and theory at UNSW since 2018. Mahsa is one of the authors of The Theatre Times, a non-partisan, global theatre portal. Mahsa has recently been offered an artist residency in Berlin to develop and produce her docudrama A Poetic Suicide. She has also finished her first non-fiction book, Haptic Visuality in Arts. She previously engaged with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), National Art School (NAS) and Carriageworks as a literary curator’s assistant.
A POETIC SUICIDE
For her Artist Residency project at MOMENTUM, Iranian filmmaker and poet Mahsa Foroughi undertakes research for the production of her new film, A Poetic Suicide. Set in three seminal cities spanning three continents – Tehran, Sydney, and Berlin – this work commingles the bitter truths of history and the poetic license of fiction to address individual and collective memory, trauma and healing, dream and reality. Based on a young poet’s life in post-revolutionary Iran, and then in Europe and Australia, A Poetic Suicide explores a young girl’s attempt to escape the trauma of persecution through an inner journey taking her to her most terrible memories and fears. The film traces the poet’s growth from a rebellious teenager in Iran to a desperate young woman in Australia, and onwards through her family connection to Berlin. Shot on location and also using found documentary footage, this film is designed as visual poetry comingling historical fact with fictional dreamscapes.