Espand: Hanna M Owens & Soheila Azadi

PROJECT:The Pairing” June 06

The artists Soheila Azadi and Hanna M Owens will perform a choreographed dance, one covered in a floor length black burka with only her eyes showing, the other nude. The dance moves are inspired by a Persian traditional dance from South of Iran as well as Sufi dance called Sama. Covered and uncovered, the simultaneous dichotomy of desire produces much feeling of boundary, limit, and expectation. There and not there, concrete and fluid, our bodies want to want.

PANEL: Personal Mythologies June 07 @ 2-4pm Society for Arts

photos by Soohyun Kim, Zhuo Yun Chen | www.hannamowens.com | www.soheilaazadi.com

Azadi: (Iran) The sound of prayer, the smell of spices, and wet mud from bricks are still fresh memories. Isfahan, that historic city, once the capital of Persia, the city in which I was taught to communicate in Farsi and Arabic, is my home – it is Iran. After attending university in Iran, I immigrated to the United States in 2003. I have lived in Michigan and Pennsylvania for nine years before I moved to Chicago in 2013. Currently I am an MFA student in the Moving Image program at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Owens: Hanna M Owens (Chicago) is a feminist artist and writer working primarily in video and performance. She currently lives in Chicago. Hanna M. Owens was born in Vermont in 1987 and raised in Maryland. She graduated summa cum laude from Towson University in 2011 holding a BA in Foreign Language with a concentration in French Literature and a BA in Art & Design with a concentration in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking. She studied French and Wolof in Dakar, Senegal as a 2009 Benjamin A. Gilman scholar and taught English in the French Ministry of Education’s TAPIF program in Calais, France in 2011 and 2012.