Gita Hashemi
Gita Hashemi is an artist and a cultural activist with strong feminist orientation. She left Iran in 1984, a year after having been expelled from the university as a result of her dissident political views and activities, and when it became clear that survival under the oppressive circumstances created by the Islamic regime was becoming impossible. Her exilic journey took her to Japan, the United States and, finally, landed her in Canada where she has been an active member of the Toronto arts community for over ten years.
With a background in mathematics, Gita started her training in Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts, Tehran University, where she was a member of a group of students that initiated a mural project by way of establishing a bridge between the arts and the popular culture. Most of the murals painted by the group were painted over during the years of the Islamic Cultural Revolution.
Gita continued her studies in visual arts at California State University at Northridge. In 2000, she earned her M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University, where she is currently a Ph.D candidate in Women’s Studies. She has maintained a multidisciplinary artistic practice that has taken her to exhibition spaces as well as film sets and theatre halls. In 1994, her costume design and construction for The Death of the King (by Bahram Beizayi, staged by Modern Times in Toronto) was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award.
Gita’s first CD-ROM, Geometamorphosis of Exile and the Moon Chronicle is a conceptual/narrative exploration on the theme of exile developed in a circular structure in four parts: displacement, alienation, absence and longing.
Gita has also worked on a number of web-based projects, including Steps to the Moonwhich documents the efforts of three Iranian women, two living in exile and the other in Iran, to rekindle their friendship through electronic communication. As they struggle to stay in contact in spite of the barriers of language, access, spatial displacement and temporal discontinuity, and under the threat of censorship by authorities in Iran, their communication sheds light on some of the daily struggles of women in Iran. ´Steps to the Moonª was exhibited as part of the WebWeavers project at InterAccess Elecronic Media Arts Centre in 1997.
Gita is currently working on Solace of Thine Eyes a narrative-driven exploration in the masculinist erotic literature and their relations to the political development of the indigenous women’s movement in Iran since the middle of the 19th century. This is envisioned as a web-based streaming media project.
Gita has served on the boards of A Space, Diversi Film and Video Fund, and InterAccess in Toronto. She is currently coordinating Webmakers, a user group focusing on web-based art at InterAccess. She co-curated Trans/Planting, a multidisciplinary exhibition of art by women from/in Iran, presently on exhibit at A Space. She is the founder of Iranian Artists in Dialogue (IAD), a listserve with over fifty member artists across the Americas and Europe.