Ki / Key Hastam

COOK, EAT & CLEAN – Ritual of Disobedience

SAT 29 NOV

Ki / Key Hastam

Artist: Kimiya Rastgou Moghadam

Format: kinetic installation

Short description

Delving into the profound duality of the Persian question «کـــــــــــــــی هســـــــــــــــتم؟», which can be read as both ki hastam(“Who am I?”) and key hastam (“When am I?”), these two questions may seem different at first, yet they are deeply intertwined and may even merge into one. Is to be someone merely to exist within the framework of time? As humans, we evolve and change, raising a poignant question: When are you whom? Are we constantly waiting for the right moment to declare, “Now, I am”? Yet, an essential thread of selfhood persists through these moments, linking the past, present, and future. This question is tethered to time, but also beyond it. It moves with time but also stands apart, making us wonder if identity is shaped by the sequence of events, or if it transcends them. In this artwork, the traditional numbers of a flip clock are replaced by the Persian phrase «کــــــــــــــــــــی As the clock moves forward, the words remain visually unchanged, yet the cards .»هــســــــــــــــــــــــــــــتــم ؟ continuously move, turning with the passage of each minute and hour. The movement of the clock therefore becomes a movement of the question itself.

BIO

Kimiya Rastgou Moghadam is an Iranian transdisciplinary artist based in Vienna, where she studies at the University of Applied Arts. Moving between installation, performance, kinetic art and material experimentation, her practice explores time, identity, memory and transformation. Through materials, gestures and repetitions, she traces the delicate threshold between stillness and movement, permanence and change, and the visible and invisible traces of being.