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| Exhibitionist |
Mental Contagion |
Kristen Alvanson Shiraz, Iran
About
the Artist | Exhibitions |
Web site | Click on thumbnails
About
the Artist
Kristen Alvanson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota . She attended
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and has a degree
from Sarah Lawrence College. She owned the well-known New York City
clothing and music store HOUSE in the early 1990s and later worked
as a Vice President at HSBC managing the bank's US philanthropy.
Alvanson relocated to the Middle East in 2006 and is currently living
and working in the Shiraz, Iran. Her current projects include:
Maskh Project
The connotation of the word maskh in Farsi is more than metamorphosis;
it includes experiencing limits of one's identity or existence
usually with the assistance of new independent vehicles of material
and abstract articulation, as in the case of spirit possession.
Maskh project is a visual compendium of drawings diagramming
Alvanson's metamorphoses in the Middle East in the form of spells
and maps.
Graveyards
This project is a psycho-geographic exploration of Middle
Eastern graveyards, entombments and post-mortem spaces escapes necromanticism
or fascination with ruins by illustrating the understanding and encounters
with space and time—and consequently the twofold of dwelling
and thinking in the Middle East.
Lumpen Orientalism
This project gathers the fragments of a lost civilization, the
decaying parts of a once breathing animal. Named after a term suggested
by China Miéville, Lumpen Orientalism is a photo blog engendering
an anomalous fascination with the Middle East in a similar way to the
mongrel techniques of Gilles Deleuze, H. P. Lovecraft, Gaëtan
Clérambault and William Beckford, who also tackle the enigmatic
monstrosity of the Middle East.
Lessons in Schizophrenia
The artist's forthcoming multi-volume book, based on real events
which led her to leave the US for the Middle East in a cataclysmic
process. It includes an introduction by the Iranian Philosopher
Reza Negarestani entitled Epithemic.
The dESIRE Project
An ongoing investigation on desire which includes artistic components;
it is an attempt to reach concrete but not necessarily corporeal
definitions of desire by tapping into its obscure formations.
dESIRE Project is intertwined with the mathematics of natural
numbers, countability/uncountability, pimp as a nomadic dissipater,
stock market, legal contracts, intangibility and expendability
of desires. Alvanson's dESIRES, both intangible and their photographic
representations, are for sale on the Market section of her Web
site.
Exhibitions
Art 101, Brooklyn NY
Bibliography
File Magazine
Maskh, in Frozen Tears III, a global anthology of theory,
art and writing
Editor: John Russell, Article Press, 2007
COLLAPSE:
Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, vol. II,
"Elysian Space in the Middle East"
Editor in chief: Robin Mackay, Oxford: Urbanomic (2007), ISBN 0-9553087-1-2
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