Kasra Goodarznezhad (@cassraa) is a new media artist based in Toronto. His main focus is Performance and Installation. After studying Graphic Design in Tehran, Iran, he came to Toronto to continue his studies at OCAD University and graduated from the Integrated Media program. Throughout his career as a new media artist, Kasra has participated in various research and results-based residencies and has managed to secure grants for his solo and collective projects.
Kasra isthe co-founder of 2 Ontario based QTBIPOC collectives, Komite and Displaced collective. Reflecting on growing up in Iran and immigrating to Canada in 2015, Kasra’s work deals with concepts of displacement, repression, memory, and censorship. In his work, Kasra looks to explore the subjective complexities of being an individual living in a society that forces you to behave in ways sanctioned by those who hold power.
Kasra Goodarznezhad’s installation, “Evolving Maps: A Collective Memory” aims to explore methodologies and new ways of recording information about physical space. The first iteration of this work used the artist’s hand-drawn maps as inputs into an AI system. Using GANs, the AI model gets trained to generate new maps based on those inputs. This iteration of the work uses submitted maps by the QTBIPOC community that were collected through a call for submissions as inputs into the AI system. These hand-drawn maps were from places that they could not pass through anymore (due to displacement, exile, barriers, destruction, border mobility, etc.), an imagined future for the oppressed, or a map of a place or a memory where they feel safe. The AI generated maps were then turned into 3D landscapes with the help of 3D artist, Fezz Stenton. This project was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
Website: www.cassraa.com
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