Artist, activist and filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi creates complex, searing documentaries, intimate fiction films, and engaged and engaging experimental film installations/performances. Born in Tehran and raised in the United States with long periods spent in both Mexico and Paris, she is a transnational artist concerned as much with history, displacement, exile, migration, trauma, invisibility, personal and collective memory - and the erasure of memory - as she is with interrogating the politics of images and aesthetic practices. She investigates the ways manufactured and manipulated images carry power, danger, and provocation.

Drawing on archival photographs and audio clips, propaganda films, television images, and internet finds, Khoshnoudi makes connections between the present and the past. From this vantage point she uncovers repetitions of history as aesthetic devices, opportunities for reflection, and possibilities for reinvention and change. While she serves as a witness – of uprisings against the dictatorship in Tehran, of migrants and exiles housed in a refugee camp in Calais, France – she insists upon multi-vocal testimonies and the power of collective storytelling as both enrichment and ethical stance.

photo: Carlos Prieto Acevedo