Atoosa Pour Hosseini

Visual Arts

01 April — 30 September 2020

About the Artist(s)

Atoosa Pour Hosseini (b. Tehran, Iran 1981) is an artist-filmmaker based in Dublin, Ireland. Her work, which is influenced by historical avant-garde cinema, explores questions about illusion, reality, and perception through the media of film, video, installation and performance art. She works with the material textures of 8mm film as well as digital processes to explore layers of space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition with startling interruptions.

She holds a MA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and a BA in Fine Art Painting from the Azad University of Art and Architecture, Tehran. She has received awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Council, Culture Ireland, and Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.

She is a member of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and a Co-Director of the Experimental Film Society (EFS) which is an Irish company dedicated to the production and screening of experimental cinema, and frequently participates in discussion forums and exchanges, such as the LUX Critical Forum in Dublin.

Her works have been shown in many galleries, museums, festivals, and showcases throughout the world, in countries such as Iran, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, USA, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Greece, Croatia, Brazil, Colombia, Portugal and Estonia. Her work forms part of the Irish and International Institutes collection as well as private collections. 

Pour Hosseini moved to Ireland in 2006 and currently lives and works in Dublin.

About Atoosa's Commission

" I believe self-isolation and quarantine period is one of if not the most important historical event within our modern times. The city feels like a ghost town, airlines are grounding flights, restaurants and other small businesses are closing. This may or may not mean that society must be on continuous lockdown for months, who knows, but people who went through long bouts of quarantine will carry the scars of their experience. I prefer to look at this period is a meditative reflection about our lives and human conditions, I’d like to experiment with this concept and portray audiovisually how time would pass around and through me within this unprecedented stage. I will use digital technology to capture a series of poetic time-lapses addressing the elements such as urban landscape, nature and private spaces mostly recorded between dusk to dawn light condition. They will be lyrical and meditative views with a haiku-like quality. I am hoping this project would instead reflect my philosophical state rather than the facade of reality."

The Dock Summer 2020 Commissions

The Dock team was looking forward to working with a number of visual artists this year. As a result of the Covid 19 restrictions, there was a break in our gallery programme. This meant that the visual artists we were to work with were now without the opportunity to exhibit. The team here think long and hard about what and who we programme in the galleries, so decided to invite the artists who are part of the 2020 programme to submit an idea and approach to developing their work during this Covid-19 lockdown. The Dock framed this as a small commission, to offer the artists encouragement to keep making work and to continue their connection with us and with you the audience.

The commissioned work was mediated via our social media platforms and here on our website.