Laleh Mehran
http://lalehmehran.com
participant in
VideoChannel – memory & identity
Video Art from USA – curated by Alysse Stepanian (USA)
Currently residing in US City/ State: Colorado
Laleh Mehran was born in Iran and relocated with her family to the United States at the start of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. The progeny of Iranian scientists, Mehran’s relationship to religion, science and politics is necessarily complex, and is still more so now given a political climate in which certain views are increasingly suspect. Indeed, we live in an era in which some speech is increasingly censored, often with the most extreme consequences for the speaker, and as such her work is of necessity as veiled as it is explicit, as personal as it is political and as critical as it is
tolerant. Mehran’s research, often modeled on and about the very idea of scientific research, assumes the privileges of science precisely for the purpose of calling it into question, even as she uses it in order to articulate a set of ideas which require precisely this kind of protection from both political and religious intolerance.
Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Electronic Time-Based Media. Her work has been shown individually and as part of art collectives at the Next 5 Minutes 4 Tactical Media Festival in Amsterdam, Holland; the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany; Ponte Futura in Cortona Itlay; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA; the Orlo Video Festival in Portland, Oregon; the Carnegie Museum of Art; The Georgia Museum
of Art; The Andy Warhol Museum; and the Pittsburgh Biennial at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in Pittsburgh, PA. Currently, Mehran is an Associate Professor and Graduate Director of the Electronic Media Arts & Design program at the University of Denver.