Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist known for assuming multiple identities. Her official press releases and gallery biographies conflict on country of origin, date of birth, and place of residence.
Her work is primarily concerned with investigating the structural underpinnings and relationships of complicity between the respective complexes of politics, commerce and industry, and in turn, their roles in dictating the shape and structure of mundane life. Haghighian creates solo and collaborative works in the fields of installation, performance, text, and sound. Her collaborations are often of an ongoing, open-ended/cumulative nature. For instance, in 2010, in collaboration with writer/researcher/curator Ashkan Sepahvand, Haghighian founded the Institute for Incongruous Translation in order to support discord and negotiation in translation.
Haghighian rejects the totalizing ideas of CVs, resumes, and bios, and insists that only biographies obtained from bioswop project be used in printed material regarding her work. Thus, the whole idea of a cogent narrative summary of his/her/their personal biography and artistic output is anathema to his/her/their assumed political and/or artistic ideals. Given that any reference information on any media platform concerning Haghighian has been appropriated from the bioswop project, the only externally verifiable fact concerning Haghighian and his/her/their artistic output in this Wikipedia entry is that her two-channel video projection Empire of the Senseless Part II (2006) is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Haghighian was chosen to represent Germany at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She created the persona of Natascha Süder Happelmann for public aspects of the installation and wore a mask during the press conference announcing the nomination. As the artist's representative, Helene Duldung read a statement and answered questions on her behalf.
Onco-mickey-catch, 2016
Taxidermy, computer, RealSense cameras,
Skype or Google Hangout, CatchEye
85 × 50 × 120 cm
Credits: Taxidermy: Neda Saeedi
Courtesy of the artist
The starting point for Onco-mickey-catch, is the somewhat-paradoxical notion of online face-to-face communication. With video-conferencing you typically look at your conversation partner’s screen image (or your own). As a result, your eyes rarely meet. CatchEye is an application designed to reorient your gaze towards the camera, ‘enhancing’ your ‘chat experience’. The app is installed here onto two monitors, which in turn protrude from the dorsal region of a furry mouse-like shape. The abnormal form is slightly reminiscent of the Vacanti mouse – the rodent Charles Vacanti used to grow ear-shaped cartilage, which became an internet sensation in the ’90s – which Sadr Haghighian connects to two other famous mice: the Oncomouse, genetically modified to become susceptible to cancerous tumours (a registered trademark, the Oncomouse was the first fully patented animal), and Mickey Mouse, often a shorthand for the military-entertainment complex.
Vice/virtue, 2001
Animation loop on a stack of paper
1 min 5 sec (looped), no sound
Courtesy: the artist
The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, guards watch over inmates. Though Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s vice/virtue does not, technically speaking, depict a panopticon, the artist conflates surveillance and spectacle under the same scopophilic regime: vice/virtue is a video loop that moves back and forth between two drawings. The first depicts a prison courtyard, the second a stage. In both drawings searchlights scan the scene. In the prison courtyard they come from above, on stage they come from below. Every twenty seconds the image starts to spin. The elements of the drawings are reorganised by the centrifugal force of the spin, with each drawing turning into the other. The prison courtyard becomes a stage – becomes a prison courtyard.