Donja Nasseri was born in Düsseldorf in 1990 and studies art at the Art Academy Düsseldorf in Gregor Schneider’s class. She is a daughter of Afghan/Egyptian parents, so she often analyses her experiences of culture clashes within the family. In her work she uses various media such as photography, video and audio and transforms them into installative presentations.
“Intermède Afghan” is based on a yearlong dispute with Donja nasseri's hidden afghan roots and her identity. It is very difficult to live in a hybrid world between different cultures. By an analog and experimental procedure, she developed the idea to take pictures of photographs from Afghanistan (which her father took in the 80s), without using editing programs, to transform the images in an unsharpness. She froze the photographs in ice to receive a threedimensional object. Her inward- and stranger feeling of Afghanistan, is exactly included in the “material” of ice.
The work consists of a variation of 13 photographs and a video. The Video is about the melting process and the interplay between two cultures. During the melting process, her father is interviewed in german. His answers are in afghan. The questions consist of easy questions like “who are you?” and also complex questions taken from Max Frischs Questionnaire, like “If you live together as husband and wife without having the same culture: do you feel excluded from your wife’s culture?”.
Interlude Afghanistan is a change between languages and cultures. A contact with a foreign culture, which is very close at the same time.
