Alexandre Dorriz
BA University
of California Berkeley
MFA
Candidate University of Southern California
Alexandre
Dorriz revisits Edward Said’s definitions around latent Orientalism and
imagines for us the Occidental Vacuum. He posits the reality of exiled bodies
Orientalizing their own Iranian narratives as a trauma-induced mechanism in
order to navigate their transnational, liminal Iranian states – looking at PTSD
symptoms such as Survivor’s Guilt and Re-Enactments within the DSM, and using
Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah series as a catalyst to understanding coping
mechanisms through exilic lenses in a Post-1979 Iranian Revolution Era while
separated from her Motherland. In Neshat’s work these coping mechanisms include
the psychotherapeutic and meditative benefits to self-portraiture and
psychotherapeutic benefits to calligraphic practices. The research observes the
anti-Iranian rhetoric rising in The New York Times from 1971 through 1976,
Neshat emigrating in 1975, and then looks at where Neshat lived and studied
until 1983, the University of California, Berkeley, and its publication’s archives,
The Daily Californian, discovering sentiments steeped in Islamophobia across
campus, within this historically liberal oasis, including bricks thrown into
the windows of Iranian students’ homes and cars.
Recorded: October 29, 2018
