Birth of Bi-Lingering

Labkhand Olfatmanesh Gazelle Samizay

The Birth of Bi-Lingering

Labkhand and Gazelle have been collaborating for several years, beginning with their video piece Bepar (2019), which was inspired by their experiences as women of Iranian and Afghan heritage to address how cultural expectations and interpersonal and geopolitical traumas transcend borders.

In late 2020, Labkhand took a workshop in which she was asked to write a love letter to herself, which she wrote easily in her second language of English. She immediately noticed that something was not right, as the process did not bring up any emotions, so she switched to writing the letter in Persian. Surprisingly, she found it very challenging to express those same feelings of love in her first language. She shared this with her bilingual therapist, who encouraged her exploration. This exercise also brought up difficult memories that blocked her self expression. When she finally wrote the letter in Persian, she found the process healing, something she didn’t experience when writing it in English. Her experience resonated with Gazelle, who also has a conflicted relationship with language. Her first words were in French, but she spoke Dari until attending school, at which point English became her dominant language. She often notices certain concepts are much easier to communicate in one language vs. another, and has also been told she speaks “sweeter” in Dari.

“Bi-Lingering” represents that in-between space where one belongs to two (or more) languages and cultures. It is both a research and artistic project in which they ask several questions including:

• Do we have different personalities in different languages?

• How do we define our “first language” or “mother tongue”?

• Are these terms interchangeable?

• Can certain memories or traumas only be accessed in one particular language?

In their beginning research they discovered that people across many language backgrounds experience shame around their bilingual expression and identity. They hope through this project that people can shed some of this shame and find power in their experiences.

To support this project, please donate to cover material costs.

Bi-Lingering was developed as part of their artist-in-residency with Side Street Projects, an artist-run organization that supports artists, projects, and programs to foster leadership through socially engaged art. They are devoted to community-led programming that promotes creativity, wellbeing, and the potential for collective growth. They are centered and led by justice-impacted communities of Pasadena and LA County.

BIOS

Labkhand Olfatmanesh was born in Tehran, Iran, and is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and curator examining themes of feminism, race, isolation, and borders in underrepresented communities. She blends fictionalized narratives with documentary techniques, portraiture, and social practice to explore intimacy, humor, psychology and transitory states that bridge one identity with another, and how these forces take shape in the United States and her birthplace of Iran. 

Labkhand has been exhibited across the US and internationally, including: Photo London U.K.; Rencontres d’Arles, France; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Helm Bakery District in collaboration with the Culver City Arts Foundation; the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Jamaica Center of Art & Learning, NY; CICA Museum, South Korea; 2020 Feminist Border Arts Film Festival, NMSU; 4Culture, Seattle, WA; and The Glass Box Gallery at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was also awarded the LensCulture Portrait Awards Jurors’ Pick and received first place at the Los Angeles Center of Photography’s second annual fine art photo competition, second place from the Craft and Folk Art Museum & Farhang Foundation, and is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, NY. Her work has also been featured by the United Nations, the British Council, and Australian High Commission, and in the UNESCO Palace, Lebanon.  She is currently a board member at Level Ground, an artist-in-residence at Side Street Projects based in Pasadena, and in the 2021 Active Innovator Leadership program at Art for LA.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and raised in rural Washington state, Gazelle Samizay’s work often reflects the complexities and contradictions of culture, nationality, and gender through the lens of her bicultural identity. Her work in photography, video, and mixed media has been exhibited across the US and internationally, including at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; the California Museum of Photography, Riverside; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, UT. Her pieces are part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY; and En Foco, NY. In addition to her studio practice, her writing has been published in One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature and she is a founding member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association. Samizay has received numerous awards and residencies, including from the Princess Grace Foundation, NY; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; the Arizona Community Foundation, Phoenix; Level Ground, Los Angeles; the Torrance Art Museum, CA; and Side Street Projects, Los Angeles. She received her MFA in photography from the University of Arizona.