Astera Mortezai is an experimental artist who lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She is born in Saqqez, East Kurdistan, in 1980. With a background of a performance artist and using a great variety of materials, she investigates the consequences of displacement on the body and stages narrative and poetic interactions between body and objects, in which accessories become partners. The body, as a poetic object, connects to its environment and expands in it, penetrates, then makes other organs, just like an environmental sculpture. «In my work, I want to highlight the presence of the body Hic et Nunc: when we are in a specific space, our body is here; it cannot be elsewhere», she says. Astera Mortezai explores small cracks in the social order to find some moments of spontaneity to share with the public, like a living poem.
KAPR
The project is a collaboration with Nicolas Manenti. It is a workshop inspired by the seasonal return of nomadic kurdish shepherds: the public is invited to cover two sculptures with a patchwork made of words: "bullshit" texts ( marketing, spams, esoterism...) are translated in different languages, cut word by word, sorted and left for the participants, who can reassemble them to create their own poetry. The statements are then stitched together to cover the sculptures, and form a shelter.