© Courtesy of the artist, Selina McCallum (2026)
Sepideh Behrouzian
Recipient of the PRIM-Dazibao production-dissemination residency
Dazibao is pleased to announce that Sepideh Behrouzian is the 2026–2027 recipient of the PRIM–Dazibao production–dissemination residency. Her research project, Dear Mother A Worn Blue Line Taking Me to Far-off Shores explores the entanglements of extractive modernity, ecology, and displacement through personal and historical narratives connected to Iran’s developing landscape.
Sepideh Behrouzian's Dear Mother A Worn Blue Line Taking Me to Far-off Shores film in progress takes as a starting point the dried-up Zayandeh Rud River in Esfahan and unfolds as a correspondence shaped by invocation, failed transmission, and the unresolved remains of extractive histories. The work approaches landscape as a site of invocation, where personal histories, extractive infrastructure and environmental exhaustion are not separate. The migration routes of the artist’s family across Iran’s oil and industrial geographies mirror the territories where extraction reshaped land, redirected water, and exhausted ecologies. Through moving images, sound, and spectral traces of absent records, the film asks how histories of empire continue to inhabit landscapes, bodies, and regimes of legibility.
Sepideh Behrouzian (b. 1985, Iran) is an artist and researcher based in Canada working across moving image, installation, print, sound, and text. Her practice examines how symbolic systems—language, images, scientific knowledge, and technological infrastructures—shape perception and material reality, sustaining some forms of life while rendering others extractable, invisible, or expendable.
She is currently a fellow in the Mensch–Maschine programme at E-WERK Luckenwalde / Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and previously completed a residency at Jan van Eyck Academie. She is the recipient of the Toronto Arts Foundation Newcomer Artist Award, the Hauptstadtkulturfonds grant, and the Südkulturfonds Artist Prize.
Dazibao thanks PRIM and the artist for their generous collaboration as well as its advisory committee for their support.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the Ville de Montréal.
Dazibao acknowledges that it is located on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation and that Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and today, is home to a diverse population of Indigenous as well as other peoples. Guided by ethics of respect, listening, and awareness, Dazibao commits to a continued reflection regarding the deep-rooted and systemic challenges tied to accessibility and inclusivity in the arts and beyond, and endeavors to apply such reflections to all aspects of its activities and governance.