In July 2020 the transdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer Gita Hashemi presented Zan-i keh Mikhaham (The Woman I Want), an online performance that offered a reading of the early radical feminist Zandokht Shirazi’s writing.1 Hashemi left Iran in the mid-1980s, after the Islamic Cultural Revolution, because Tehran University’s School of Fine Arts expelled her for “anti-Islamic activities.” Eventually landing in Canada as a refugee, and based now in Toronto, she has been creating works in new media, installation, performance, social practice, and publishing for the past thirty years. Hashemi’s work focuses on marginalized histories. She draws on rigorous research, which she sees as an intervention in contemporary politics, often using language and text as visual and performative elements. Since her 2008 piece Ephemeral Monument, Hashemi has been known for using calligraphic writing in live performances, an artistic method that she brought to a truly monumental scale...

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