Shervin Atighehchi

There is nothing in the senses that was not first in matter; there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.""
In my work, I question the materiality of affect and sensation beyond human limits. What does an apple do? Can white paint cover the division between all material?
I create environments where every surface is covered in white wall paint, a material which is freely accessible for use in the institution. Within this space, the value and hierarchy assigned to objects is disrupted. By covering environments and objects in white paint, their function and purpose are suspended, returning them to a state before creation where only exterior forms remain, like traces of the material flows that produced them. A cup persists while the water inside changes; scissors continue to exist beneath the white surface. I choose objects associated with violence and sexuality, they become abstracted into contours, lines, and silent gestures detached from clear use or meaning. What this constructed environment enables is a force of inertia. In a performance I continuously lick the roses In the environment, seeking an escape through them, much like the figure in Francis Bacon’s Figure at a Washbasin escaping through the sink.
Gilles Deleuze describes this escape through the concept ""Bodies without organs,"" where the body senses itself temporarily through a single point in the environment or one of its organs. Deleuze identifies the living reality of this condition as ""Hysteria.""
Historically, hysteria is a constructed reality: An androcentric view of sexuality stripped women of their agency to achieve orgasm through masturbation and instead offered them technical orgasms as cures for the supressed tension it created.
I see echoes of this cyclic condition everywhere: a grasshopper which was trapped on a piece of tape escaped after losing a leg or stretched bodies on torture beds in Gravensteen castle. I wonder how material and kinetic circulation creates such recurring events: a body attempting to escape through the sacrifice of another, or of its own organs. Is this circular movement a destiny? A changeless change?
Through my work, I ask if we can dream of a reality beyond sacrifice. I hope to stretch the circular material kinetic that constructs conditions like hysteria, make it into a carpet and to move on it with the flow of white paint, from past to present, to cover this material condition in white and bring the attention to this flow of movement. 
Objects do not preexist their material conditions; they are created experimentally, modified by the body, and in turn, modifying the body itself.

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