“Portrayal of Resistance” is a visual anthology, featuring two ongoing series “Gordafarid” and “Breath” by the San Francisco-based filmmaker and visual storyteller, Niloofar Asadi (b. 1983, Tehran, Iran), exploring themes of rebellion, resistance, and trauma, through examining dichotomies in women’s gendered experience in contemporary society. 

Asadi draws from her experience in film, photography, and theater to create character-driven work that explores identity and representations of the self. She considers her work as a site for negotiating questions of identity, a fusion of cultural influences, a yearning for a mutual gaze, and an embodiment of a desire for a shared understanding and connection in a broad cultural panorama.

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In this multimedia solo exhibition, Asadi blends still photography, motion pictures, sound, and installations with a theatrical quality to depict an emotionally evocative and immersive story with a subjective lens and a formalistic visual language, seeking to provoke and converse. In “Portrayal of Resistance”, Asadi develops a transcultural visual language, characterized by a personal accent of visual metaphors that pay lineage to her own complex background.

The central theme in this visual odyssey is the politicized female body, the contested territory where Niloofar examines the malleability of identity as a construction and the performative nature of subjectivity and gender identity. Through embodying multiple personas via self-portraiture in “Gordafarid” and capturing the contrasting psychological states of a female subject in “Breath”, Niloofar captures the multiplicity of Female representations and navigates complex intersections of societal power structures, agency, and resistance. 

In both series on exhibit, she draws upon the female body as a canvas of expression, a symbol of rebellion, and a site for defiant acts of resistance to inform collective social movements. She juxtaposes compositions adhering to formalist principles with emotionally evocative hues to achieve an expressive gesture and a dynamic dialogue between the visual elements. Her aim is to create an intimate, subjective, and provocative experience with an immersive quality that seeks introspection and participatory viewership.

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