Negin Ehtesabian
Negin Ehtesabian is an interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, and designer. Ehtesabian studied Visual Communication at the University of Tehran and Animation at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK. Her artistic practice involves collaborative new media, illustration, design, and intercultural art and research projects. The artist’s recent focus has been on interdisciplinary and collaborative art projects and book art.
The project Tehran Correspondence: “In Pieces” is a mail art piece, an Eastern response to American artist Ray Johnson's mail art. It expresses the struggle that people from countries like Iran have to endure for traveling to the West; such as their visa rejected several times, having to prove financial and employment stability and family connections in order to spend a week somewhere for a holiday or for professional reasons and still, they might be rejected for a visa.
This version of Ehtesabian’s work represents the unavoidable fragmentation of the individual subjected to this intense forensic process of rejection induced by an indiscriminately volatile political condition. She responds by developing a methodology of time-archiving, including visual codes which express emotions as time experience in her desire to reconstitute the fragments.