Negin Ehtesabian

Tehran Correspondence: “In Pieces”

It is a mail art piece, an Eastern response to American artist Ray Johnson's mail art. It expresses the struggle that people from countries like Iran have to endure for traveling to the West; such as their visas being rejected several times, having to prove financial and employment stability and family connections in order to spend a week somewhere for a holiday or for professional reasons and still, they might be rejected for a visa.

This version of Ehtesabian’s work represents the unavoidable fragmentation of the individual subjected to this intense forensic process of rejection induced by an indiscriminately volatile political condition. She responds by developing a methodology of time-archiving, including visual codes which express emotions as time experiences in her desire to reconstitute the fragments.