Maryam Katan
Maryam Katan is an Iranian artist working with animation, film and audio-visual installations. In her practice, she is engaged with meanings of displacement and repositioning in non-original discourses, searching for alternative cognitive models.
Her early quest was mostly focused on virtual identity and media immersion. Maryam pays a great deal of attention to alternative screenings and the interaction between video and performance, art in public spaces and the audience’s undetermined encounter with the art work. Recently, she has been seeking animation as an approach, motion intervention and reanimating as an act of resistance.
After graduating in animation directing, in 2015, from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, she became more engaged with experimental animation studies. Maryam then started to work as the Experimental Animation department’s editor, in an Iranian magazine specialised in animation and published by DEFC (the documentary and experimental film center), as well as a board member of the “Animation; Experiment” collective.
“I have been moving between Tehran and different locations for the last four years, however, instead of having an immigration goal, these departures were more bound to the ideas of eventual returning, being in a temporary state, and the concept of the artist on the move. Moreover, as I realised in retrospect, these departures contained the illusion of being effective. My type of artistic and cultural activities, together with the rather isolated and safer middle class I belonged to, gradually become distant from what a contemporary individual in Iran struggles with. The potential points of resistance that I was considering valid seemed to have lost sense.
In 2020, in the search for more stability and a context differing from the Iranian perpetual binary of hardship and hope, I immigrated to Belgium. After a short period of living and studying in Gent, I decided to move to Berlin to continue developing my art and research practices“.