We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Narges Rezaian. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Narges below.

Narges, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Coming to Canada and immigration introduced its own challenges along with its valuable opportunities. Being an immigrant, and being seen as the ‘other,’ although seemingly intimidating, introduced a unique chance to go beyond all the boundaries set against one’s imagination to become not anything but one’s true and idiosyncratic self. Therefore, I dedicated my thesis project, Pilgrim, to capturing and embodying the process of immigration and how it can help go beyond the definitions and transform into a unique individual. I found insects to be a perfect form of body to visualize such a transformation since we usually do not attribute human traits to them and they resemble the otherness I strived to embody as a chance of becoming a unique being.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

As an Iranian woman, I was raised in a country ruled by a misogynist religious dictatorship where women are educated and forced to wear hijab from childhood which rendered me extremely self-conscious about my body. However, this systematic oppression inversely initiated my fascination with the body, especially in cartoons where it could take any shape and never break. I started my career in the animation industry in 2005 and excelled in character animation and design.

Later on, I returned to academia to deepen my knowledge of animation and art in general. During my first master’s degree program in Animation at Tehran University of Art, I was exposed to the films of Jan Svankmajer whose application of animated body as a form of social and political criticism inspired me to shape my own artistic approach focusing on the theme of the body which I found to not only be a unique vessel to smuggle my message of resistance and fight against gender discrimination but also help me to nourish and empower my body image. The result of such endeavours was my first independent short animation I Is Not There.

My journey continued as I got admitted to the MFA program in Media Production at the University of Regina. Thanks to my professors’ guidance and support, I was introduced to butoh dance -an avant-guard Japanese dance theatre with a radical and unprecedented approach to the body- which led me to exercise this school of dance and consequently develop a new style in illustrating and animating my bodies. Also, I recognized the haptic qualities of stop-motion animation which also made me enjoy the process of artmaking as much as the result itself. I find such an approach critical to artistic growth and worthy of practice for young artists. These explorations led to my other experimental animations with autobiographical and socio-political references, Changeling and Pilgrim. 

Following my scholarly endeavours as an inextricable part of artistic growth, I perpetually strive to find novel ideas to nourish my imagination. I also embrace new challenges as I have learned that a pupa does not become a butterfly before breaking out of its cocoon.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

To be able to link art and social problems and use the language of art as a vessel to communicate these issues in a new and effective way to promote critical thinking in our society and also encourage people to support artistic creation more as a form of activism and call for social justice.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Government-funded organizations are one of the most important ways to support independent artists to address social issues and struggles of minorities. However, people can help artists by supporting their art directly, which in my view starts with artists connecting to their audience on deeper levels by making meaningful art about people’s struggles and challenges.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nargesrezaian.wixsite.com/myportfolio
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/narges.rezaian/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narges-rezaian-66172990/