Philine: I’d like to go back to the beginning. Your artistic practice doesn’t explicitly focus on historical female artist figures, yet it repeatedly draws connections to social phenomena or to the past. You applied for this residency format, which included participation in the anniversary exhibition of Paula Modersohn-Becker. What motivated you? Why did you think: this could be interesting—developing a work starting from a historical figure?

Anahita: When I think about my practice, it always relates to existing things and to other artistic positions. I look at things, I let myself be influenced, and many of my works are in explicit dialogue with already existing pieces. That thread runs throughout my work.

“Historical figure” can be understood in many ways. Much of what shaped me comes from the late 20th century, a period that feels much closer to me. Perhaps that’s why I found it exciting, for the exhibition in Worpswede, to think about what connections I actually have to Paula Modersohn-Becker. And those connections do exist—they go back to my school years in Hamburg, where her work kept appearing, probably because of its local relevance. I was interested in how that influenced me—then and now. Her painting doesn’t feel distant to me, but I wanted to understand how I think about it decades later, from my current perspective, and 25 years after leaving northern Germany. And whether, as a German with Iranian background, I can actually see Modersohn-Becker only from a “German” perspective.

I’m drawn to creating references that aren’t immediately obvious—especially those that reveal cultural and geopolitical tensions. Engaging with a figure like Paula Modersohn-Becker raises questions for me about belonging, visibility, and womanhood across time and space—the search for a female gaze that resists domestication.

I haven’t spent much time in Germany in recent years, but I grew up here. These multiple locations of identity—as part of a post-migrant generation navigating structural racism while also working with German art institutions—shape my perspective strongly. This fragmented in-between-ness, even a kind of outsider position, interests me: How does one exist within which context? Who is allowed to speak, who relates to what, and which voices are heard? Who establishes which references, and from what standpoint? And especially: what happens beyond the German framework?

Philine: That’s fascinating. The exhibition was indeed meant to incorporate a contemporary and broadened perspective. You’re talking about fragmentation, about the question of who gets to speak. I think your work does exactly that: it opens up different viewpoints and narratives, while the exhibition as a whole appears rather homogeneous. Was that an intentional counterpoint for you?

Anahita: Yes, at least I tried to approach it that way. I’m interested in visitors with very different backgrounds—school classes, for example. Who feels addressed by what, and who doesn’t? What does the museum communicate, and what remains unsaid? I dislike closed narratives; they often feel reductive and didactic.

What I found beautiful in engaging with Paula Modersohn-Becker is that she herself worked and wrote in a fragmented way. Her letters and diary entries aren’t linear—they’re open, sometimes surprisingly contradictory. That made it exciting to approach her work in this way, rather than stylizing or simplifying it—to take the work seriously, to take the artist seriously, and to do so from an unpreset perspective. Modersohn-Becker’s work is often approached with uncritical affection; many refer to her simply as “Paula” or “our Paula,” as if she were a familiar friend or relative. But that too is a form of appropriation. I didn’t want to do that—I wanted to step back and look closely at the works themselves, and read them beyond what is commonly said about them. This was interesting for me because I often deal with themes related to Iran or other global contexts—the relationship between the Western art-historical canon and cultural spaces outside of it.

Philine: You mentioned that you worked a lot with texts—not just her visual work but also her written legacy. What role did these sources play? Did you treat them as historical documents or more freely as narrative starting points?

Anahita: In my video work “آسمان تقسیم‌ناپذیر (Āsmān-e taqsim-nāpazir),” I include quotations from Modersohn-Becker’s letters and diaries. I read almost all of them. I stay very close to the original—I don’t alter anything, and I cite precisely, including year and addressee.

But of course I make a selection. I choose passages that interest me. And through that, it becomes clear how her texts change over the years—depending on her circumstances, whether in Bremen, Paris, or Worpswede. This creates a fragmented yet fascinating picture.

I combine these passages with quotations and voices of Iranian women that I collected. This selection is also fragmented—a compilation of different voices and ideas, spoken in the video by nine different people who enter into a relationship with one another. I want to show multiplicity—no randomness, but deliberate contrasts and linkages.

Quoting runs through many of my works. I cite explicitly and name sources, while simultaneously handling them freely—how one can do it artistically, unlike in academic writing. I use that freedom consciously.

Philine: That approach has incredible strength. From an academic perspective, I’m struck by how you handle quotes and sources. You identify them clearly, but their new placement transforms their meaning. The historical loses weight or gains urgency.

Anahita: Even when you work documentarily or aim for historical accuracy, it always remains partly a construct. As an artist, I try to make that visible by combining different elements and showing the construction instead of presenting a single narrative.

Philine: This approach also exists in science studies and philosophy, where both the research perspective and the overlap between fact and fiction are foregrounded. Your artistic engagement with sources shows that every interpretation of facts is always also fiction—a construction shaped by a particular perspective. You highlight that there are many possible narratives. Was it clear from the beginning that you would bring Modersohn-Becker into dialogue with contemporary issues—social questions or references to Iran and the Middle East? Or did that emerge during your research?

Anahita: I had that in mind from the start, but not as a fixed concept. I wanted to find out if and how it could work. The work itself asks the question: How can one create such references? Can one do it at all, and what happens when one tries?

My own voice isn’t directly audible in the video, but it’s present in my selection of quotes. Reflecting on my position within the work is very important to me. Especially when it concerns Iranian voices and women, I find it crucial to ask: Who is heard, who is given a platform? How, for example, Western narratives of “emancipation” continually use the bodies of other women to assert their own progressiveness?

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement circulated globally in 2022, but in Western contexts it was often received in simplified or sentimentalized ways. I’m now interested in how this movement and its words—woman, life, freedom—are read in Germany in 2025, in a country that simultaneously emphasizes solidarity and produces structural discrimination. How Iranian voices—and Middle Eastern voices more generally—are perceived in Germany. Often through a Western-liberal understanding of emancipation or resistance that rarely reflects its own structural power dynamics. A notion of “liberation” and “solidarity” that often functions as a neocolonial gesture. This projection and appropriation is subtle, but profound, and it is visible in the art world as well as in media discourse. When Western institutions speak of “women’s rights” or “liberation,” it is often a mirror for their own moral purity and superiority. Solidarity quickly becomes an aesthetic accessory: banners on facades, T-shirts, expressions of support where “Western values” remain unquestioned—while the same institutions scrutinize artists from the Middle East as soon as they mention Palestine. So much painful and violent tension exists here, and as someone who is politically active beyond my artistic practice, I sometimes wonder if these issues can be addressed artistically at all.

I can’t fully answer that, so my approach is first to listen and to distrust the mechanisms through which voices from the Middle East—and especially female voices—are filtered, translated, or politically appropriated in Western contexts. I try to observe what is there without immediately judging or imposing my perspective. I let the voices stand and try to give them space—precisely because they are so often denied it.

Philine: That’s an important point. Many voices are immediately categorized or instrumentalized—assigned a meaning that doesn’t correspond to where they come from.

Anahita: Exactly. It happens constantly, and it has political consequences. Translation and publication are often forms of power. In Western discourses, intelligibility is treated as a precondition for recognition—those who remain unreadable are considered “difficult” or “incomprehensible.” I see the right to remain unreadable as a form of self-determination. Allowing contradiction doesn’t mean provoking—it means creating space to listen differently.

Philine: Your work reflects that very consciously. And you extend that question to the audience. Viewers feel it and continue thinking—there’s no simple answer. That’s one of the strengths of the work: it keeps the question open.

Anahita: That was important to me. I deliberately wanted a different approach—no simplification, no symbolic appropriation.

Philine: In addition to the video work, you also created an artwork in public space. How important is that to you—working outside the museum, beyond the protective institutional framework?

Anahita: Very important. I’m glad it worked out, because the outdoor piece is closely connected to the themes. A museum is a place of control—it knows how it wants to speak about art, it reaches a certain audience. But who goes there, who sees the work? In public space, the work loses that safety; people encounter it by chance, regardless of interest or prior knowledge. The piece is visible in different locations around Worpswede, accessible to everyone, whether they want it or not. The outdoor work is intentionally fragmented. It consists of nine words in different languages and refers to the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom.” I’m interested in what happens—within the tension between artistic freedom and social responsibility—when I break the slogan apart and bring it into public space in three languages: Farsi, English, and German.

What happens when one doesn’t read the slogan as a fixed slogan but instead reconsiders it in 2025, in a more fragmented and open way? What do these words mean in Germany, now, on the walls of Worpswede? Ai Weiwei writes in his text about Germany from October 2025: “When the majority believe they live in a free society, it is often a sign that the society is not free. Freedom is not a gift; it must be wrestled from the hands of banality and the quiet complicity with power.”

Philine: For me, the two works—the video and the outdoor piece—complement each other strongly. They function independently, but together they unfold their full impact. Especially in the context of Worpswede, a village rather than a city, this presence in public space becomes very pronounced. You encounter the fragments in different locations, and through this minimal intervention—the splitting, the translation—there’s room to rethink the slogan. It’s lifted out of familiar political and media contexts and becomes a productive irritation.

Anahita: I’m glad you say that. That was precisely the intention: to create an irritation that opens up the gaze. Some people understand Farsi, others don’t. For some, one word is legible, for others not.

Philine: Yes, and this multilingualism, this coexistence of understanding and not understanding, is a powerful image.

Anahita: Exactly. It’s not about making everything comprehensible, but about keeping difference and ambiguity visible—and showing that this is okay.

Philine: Wonderful. Then let’s end here—thank you for the conversation.

Anahita: Thank you.