MMARIA & BEHROOZ MOOSAVI

AUDIOVISUAL LIVE-PERFORMANCE

Behrooz Moosavi and Janna Heiß work together as an artist-duo, a couple coming to terms with their own history. They incorporate their own origins, cultural and political influences, and social change into their work.
They often begin by examining themselves until they confront, compare, and analyse each other, translating their shared experiences into a collaborative visual and aural body of work.
The development in this process is often fluid and demarcations hardly possible, as the two artists share both artistic work and a personal, intimate life. Thus the works are never just analyses and superficial research projects, but always very personal experiences that arise in exchange and therefore often develop a very poetic harmony and at the same time tragedy.
The background of the work of both artists are experienced traumas: the trauma of delocalization and dislocation, the loss of ones own background, the loss of loved ones and the destruction of a non-existent future. Both artists* draw on these themes and build on them a common discourse, exchange and work.

SUBVERSIVE DESIRES

“There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn´t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.”
– Mark Fisher, Capitalist realism – is there no alternative?

Past events flash in our memories - flashlights, connected and yet single events.

One hardly remembers the day when one realized that all this will eventually make us run against the wall. Surrounded by imaginaries which provide the way on what to think, how to act and what not to do. Momentary emotional and situational images fade away in the cycle of new events. Long-termness is triggered by the constant overstimulation of the mind with new occurrences. The public space is taken by the others, controlled, and determined. The retreat into ever smaller, narrower, structures are the consequences of a worldwide pandemic and a worldwide awareness that we are on a knife's edge, standing with one foot over the precipice. The boundaries between war, severe weather disasters and disease are blending into a single black hole that is sucking us, our minds.

"Behrooz Moosavi & MMaria" duo’s musical and visual landscape tries to react to the sensory, imagery and auditory perception of a world in collapse in which they find themselves in as observers forced to watch it as it is being decomposed, dissolved and disintegrated.

BEHROOZ MOOSAVI (Music) & MMARIA (Visuals)

Live @ Timcheh Electronic Music Festival Köln 2021

ON ONTOLOGICAL DEATH

Martin Heidegger defines ontological death as a kind of collapse of the imaginary order, the collapse of the meanings and orders on which we rely to establish and maintain our sense of identity and reality.

One is ontologically dead when one can no longer be anything because the sense of self that one draws upon to define oneself has lost its meaning. The self deconstructs itself in light of social developments. What remains is a dulled, resigned body, an airless space, a depression and a longing, a nostalgia for something that is not real.

Both artists are in a state of threshold that makes them swim between their past and the desire for a stable future. They are constantly searching for their own origins, which must be seen in the overall concept of a society, and for a future framework, which is becoming increasingly blurred before their eyes, cannot sustain itself, and ultimately seems to disappear altogether.

BEHROOZ MOOSAVI (Music) & MMARIA (Visuals)

Live @ TADAEX Festival Tehran 2018

BEHROOZ MOOSAVI (Music) & MMARIA (Visuals)

Live @ Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival 2019

BEHROOZ MOOSAVI (Music) & MMARIA (Visuals) - Livestream
@ Ost Anders 2020 : #digitale_liebe from Berlin 2020