In their collaborative work, Aylin Abbasi and Adam Ash Barbu explore intersecting political, familial, and art historical perspectives to propose new models of inheritance and becoming. Together, they think through artistic creation in times of extended crisis, weaving together narratives of global feminisms and trans/queer politics. Their interdisciplinary research develops a dialogic approach to video, photography and performance. For Abbasi and Barbu, self-portraiture is not an individual act but rather a relational process that always already gathers from other lives. These projects measure the weights and freedoms of names, identities, and origin stories. Language is questioned as a pathway to movement in which to travel distances of physical and emotional proportions. Staging sequences of continuously alternating positions, they negotiate the line between fiction and non-fiction, director and directed, and incident and objecthood.
Mother Ladder Night
Aylin Abbasi and Adam Ash Barbu
2023
Single channel video, 48:55 minutes
