مسافر: Mosafer (the Traveller)

This thesis poses questions about the preservation of culture and language amongst generations of Iranian immigrants living in North America. It investigates the socio-cultural implications of hybridity as they relate to interethnic exchange and the globalizing process of travel and translation. Working with notions of “third space” or “the space in-between” (Clifford,1992; Bhabha, 1994) and Farzad Sharifian’s research on the globalization of English (2012), this work explores how the use of the hybrid language Persian-English affects an Iranian sense of identity in a globalized world. Susan Stewart’s discussion on the agency of objects to generate narratives which are central to a cultural experience (1993) is discussed as it applies to the use of objects in the artworks being examined in this paper. An analysis of several contemporary autoethnographic works from recent art history, such as Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988), Zineb Sedira’s Mother Tongue (2002), and Ala Ebtekar’s Elemental (2004), is used to form a basis for a discussion of hybrid identity and how inherited language can complicate cultural exchange. The artistic projects that come out of this research are Ma Miaeem va Miravim (We Come and Go), 2016, and Soghat (Souvenir), 2017. Ma Miaeem va Miravim (We Come and Go) is an artist book based on the first-grade English book, We Come and Go (1954), which employs a hybrid translation of Persian-English—in which Persian words are written using the Roman alphabet. Soghat (Souvenir) is a series of sculptures made from everyday objects and string, which investigates how culture travels through objects. These artworks are discussed to explore ways in which meaning can be lost, gained, or altered, through the substitution of signifiers and the co-mingling of cultures.