Bita Razavi

Iranian artist residing in Finland and Estonia (born 1983)
Veneetsia biennaal, Eesti paviljon

Bita Razavi (1983) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is centered around observations on everyday situations and bringing the personal to the public sphere. She sheds light on the inner workings of social systems in relation to the political structures of various countries. She reacts to, and explores, the agency of the objects and the systems as they act upon her, and as she documents and records them. (2011) at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, she carried out an artistic ceremony, in which she married the artist Jaakko Karhunen in reaction to worsened immigration policies, the rise of a populist right wing party and their introduction of lowering the funds for contemporary art. The project ended in 2017 with a public divorce ceremony. In 2020  Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma obtained both works in the form of video installations and personal valuables in their collection. Because of her experience of living in Iran, Estonia and Finland, Razavi is well equipped to reflect on the relationships of these cultures and on the perception of her heritage in the Western world. For instance, Razavi’s work “Pictures from Our Future, Pictures from Our Past” (2018) started from a situation on the street in Tartu where a young man said Razavi was a “picture of the future of Estonia”. In the series of photographs, we see Razavi embodying the average Estonian woman in various everyday roles. It also features photographs of empty country houses that have been abandoned, while dropping hints towards the radical social changes connected with the refugee crisis and urbanisation processes, but also the memory of the violent deportations in Estonia’s past. Alongside her autofictional works, the installation “The Dog Days Will Be Over Soon” (2019) combining ready-made images from videogames and objects like PC hardware together with live moss and other plans, she points towards both the merging of artificial and natural materials, and the growing distance between humans and wild nature.

Browse 1 works in the catalogue →

Contemporaries in Veneetsia biennaal, Eesti paviljon: Emilie Rosalie Saal

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Data from MuIS and the EKM Digital Collection. Full catalogue