Krista and Rashin met when they were both living in Boston in the early 2000’s. But they have been making art together long before that, in shared dreams and imaginative realms that they have traveled together in deep time, long before their bodies arrived in that New England city, before people in their shared community and the instructors at neighboring schools said to each of them again and again, have you seen the work of this woman, I think there is something about the two of you…

From 2007-2011, they made a series of video and sound installations together titled 160 Years of Pressure:

1848: an Iranian woman in Badasht, 95 miles north of Tehran, by the name of Tahirih, unveiled her face in a group of men in a proclamation of undeniable equality.

1848: a group of American women in the United States, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, and Jane Hunt met for tea in Seneca Falls, 270 miles north of New York, and began the women’s suffrage movement.

About their collaborative partnership:

Born in Iran and the United States, our artistic collaboration is a sociopolitical position. It embodies our purpose in creating artworks: physically bringing together bodies, cultures, and artistic mediums to create a moment of encounter where the preconceptions we hold about each other and ourselves collapse.

PROJECTS

A Father’s Lullaby, 2019

Rashin had recorded hundreds of hours of conversations with recently incarcerated fathers, inviting them to sing lullabies that had been sung to them in childhood, or that they sung to their children before they were separated by the US penal system. I spent an entire spring into summer listening, walking, sensing into synchronicities and syncopations, into the music between the stories, into a pause or a halting intake of breath, listening for the waves of the black Atlantic and the submerged voices under it all. My role, along with sound artist and composer Christian Gentry, was to create immersive soundscapes that moved in and out of narrative, inviting sensorial encounters with stories that envelope the space or are activated by touch.

This piece is a multi-year, research-based community co-creation initiative that began in 2015. It interrogates racial bias and structural racism and acknowledges the role of media and technology in perpetuating this challenge as well as their potential to disrupt historical patterns. A Father’s Lullaby aims to be a poetic movement where art and technology mobilize a plethora of voices while utilizing public places and virtual spaces to ignite a more inclusive dialogue to effect social change, democratizing access to technology and storytelling through community co-creation. A Father’s Lullaby materializes in a vast array of creative and public engagement opportunities, including an ongoing series of public interventions, immersive, interactive, and participatory installations, incubation labs, tech workshops, and a pioneering XR co-creation pedagogy at Emerson College launched in Spring of 2020.

exhibited at:

• Tribeca Fim Festival: In Search of Us, New York New York - 2025

• Prix Ars Electronica, Linz Austria - 2021

• SOMARTS, San Francisco CA - 2021

• Concord Art, Concord MA - 2021

• The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA - 2019

• The Boston Center for the Arts, Boston MA- 2018

Selected by Prix Ars Electronica for the 2021 Award of Distinction in the Digital Musics category

We Break Down Ourselves, 2012

exhibited at:

Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY

project description:

Exhibited at the Migrations group exhibition at Proteus Gowanus, a gallery at the intersection of art, citizen science and local ecology archives, We Break Down Ourselves evokes the strains of a future nostalgia that clings with evangelical fervor to the waste products and animal remains of a mythical past --the current present-- where biodiversity and limitless forms of object production are still living realities. Here, as has been the case so many times in the past, the female body becomes the site on which these holy objects of strange desire are ritualized, revealed, discarded, and cast off.The title of this 4-way collaboration comes from a line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s eighth “Duino Elegy”: 

"It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves." -Rainer Maria Rilke

With text by Beatrice Marovich and sculptural objects by Kathy Dragomer 

160 Years of Pressure, 2006-2011

exhibited/screened at:

New York, Boston, San Francisco, Providence, Vancouver

160 Years of Pressure parallels that wavelike motion now set in the intimate, personal space of one woman. The sound, video, drawings, and objects that comprise the project, in total, explore isolated moments of self-reflection, repulsion, confusion, outrage, and desire, and the building pressure of that tumult.  It is our response to what has or has not taken place since the circumstances in 1848.