Interview | Marjan Moghaddam

Margherita Pincioni | 19 Febbraio 2020

Words by / margherita_pincioni /

Digital protagonist and subversive of the web, Marjan Moghaddam, is a conceptual artist; through her work she builds three-dimensional characters and environments that recall the landscapes of video games or virtual reality. She uses enhanced figures as a mean of interrupting social situations and events, exhibitions and catwalks, to explore critical issues such as feminism and capitalism, marginalization and social disparity.

Can you describe yourself in five words? 
Digital Artist, Animator, Badass, Woman.

You are a pioneer of the visual method "hacking", can you tell us more about it?         
I basically pioneered hacking my digital art into exhibition contexts transgressively as a way of showing digital art. Starting in 2016, I hacked my art and critical discourse into found and shot footage of exhibitions, or the physical exhibitions themselves sometimes, as a way of engaging in the type of dialog that I find as missing from most contemporary art contexts, while democratizing the exhibition space and radicalizing curation. So its a type of digital intervention also in terms of the content, because as I always say, to hack is merely transgressive,but to do so with a critical discourse is transformational. And the works occasionally goes viral like “Baisser at Mary Boone in Glassish and Waxish” or “GlitchGoddess at Art Basel Miami 2018 with Picasso and Wood”. 

How did you get closer to this job? 
It evolved organically out of my existing fine arts exhibition practice with digital media and animation which was previously mostly geared towards curated gallery and museum shows or media festivals and the net. Eventually, it seemed to me that most of the art that I looked at was online, and most of my physical shows would only be seen as documentation on social media. That’s when I had this idea back in 2016 to do my #arthacks by hacking my art into found and shot exhibition footage on Instagram. 

You work in an environment dominated by men. Is that easy? 
It used to be much harder, but things have changed. Now when I meet men in tech companies that I have to work with, they all know who I am and they know my work  so they tell me how much they like my work or how they are big fans. In tech the work can sometimes open doors in all those ways it can’t in the art world.  But working in a male dominated field is something I'm well trained for, I grew up as an only girl with brothers, so I was always playing with boys and learned how to deal with them from an early age. But the aspects of the male dominated industry that now bother me more are the total lack of acknowledgement for the work of women in general, and how much harder it is for us to get recognition for our originality, the things we have innovated, or how good our work is. There is still this huge perception problem in the art world, and also tech to a lesser extent, that always assumes greater value in what a man does, but is highly suspicious of the value of what a woman does. If you look at how work by men and women are sold and for how much, you can clearly see the difference. And sometimes women in positions of power can be worst than the men in terms of valuing or trusting the women who do the work. So its not necessarily just the men who make it hard, but the patriarchal programming of both sexes. 

Your work is very transgressive. What is your message to the public? 
I think I look for opportunities to create and exhibit the type of art I want to see, which is innovative, original, thought-provoking, and actively engaged in an aesthetic, political, cultural, social, philosophical and sometimes even a metaphysical dialog, while expanding the possibilities for technology art. And  I use the inherent immateriality and interventionist aspects of the digital to facilitate this type of work. Exhibition footage is data, and I’m a spatial computing artist, so I’m not bound by the physical or conceptual rules that define an exhibition, to me its all data, and that allows me to fluidly engage in the type of dialog that I believe the art of this century must be engaged in. So, I’m really responding to the exigencies of our time in a technologically empowered way. 

How do you choose the songs and the characters from your art works? 
I have a real improvisational and stream of consciousness approach, and I’m always dealing with creative flow and the internet “now”. The music is usually something I hear on Soundcloud that suddenly clicks, same for the voiceovers of art historians or artists I’m listening to. I do the #arthacks during the artfairs as they’re happening, so I use what I see as a starting point for experimentation  or dialog and that determines the work.  Other times events inform it, like when the Jeff Koons puppy crashed during Art Basel Miami 2016 and I saw it as a metaphor for the shattering of America right after the 2016 Trump election, and that then became the #arthack I did. Or when I saw the 100 years of the Nude survey at Gagosian in 2016, which had no digital nude or non-binary one, and intervened with my Non-Binary Nude. So the interventions always have a conceptual component. Or many of my Armory show hacks are critiques of the over commodification and financialization of the art world.

What were you drawing when you were a child? 
I was drawing the usual things that children draw, mixed with fantastic things out of my imagination. 

The future, do you think, it will be all digital? 
I see it as more hybridized, physical and digital, but not entirely one or the other, unless we become a post apocalyptic survivalist society, at which one point huge parts of it will be exclusively physical. 

Do you have an object, person, something that brings you luck?
I don’t have objects for luck but more  for inspiration and magic. I have a long shelf above my workstation in my studio which I curate with a variety of little figurines, postcards, prints, little drawings, chachkas and I change the items for inspiration based on what I’m working on. It  includes a range of things from lets say an Ishtar figurine to statues of Greek philosophers, kitschy porcelain chipmunks,  and a replica of an ancient Grecian urn depicting Amazons in battle. But I mix in personally significant items too, like my deceased brother’s miniature pocket edition of 1000 Physics Formulas (he was an AI,  machine learning pioneer and scientist) and a small picture of punk rock me, with spiky platinum blond hair.