Through her practice Nasim Nasr explores and comments on both specific and universal concerns, addressing the anima of the human condition by engaging issues of civil and social turbulence, and the challenges of articulating personal identity within a new cultural context. Her recent works articulate the complexity of identity—the individuality and the innermost-self—within this context, questioning what constitutes the boundaries of self and society, as personally experienced between the artist’s past and present homelands.

The single-channel video work Ashob: Unrest (2015), takes as its focus the recital of a passage from twentieth-century Persian author Sadegh Hedayat’s seminal text, The Blind Owl (1937). Although the image focuses only on the artist’s mouth reciting the passage, the audio soon becomes a cacophony of different languages, interweaving and competing to become a polyglot of both eloquence and confusion. While the spoken excerpt speaks of the universal experience of the psyche in flux, the barrage of voices is a reminder of the difficulty of understanding of identity across cultures.