Obsession No. 47 - Limited Edition of 5 Photograph

Aida Chehrehgosha is born in Teheran, Iran 1979 and curenntly lives in Stockholm, Sweden. I have never actually considered myself a photographer. I see myself as a sort of a performance artist who puts itself in its own nightmares, obsessive thoughts and memories. I reenact the image that is present in my mind. I build it up physically and then place myself in front of it. A sort of exposure therapy. The photograph has always been a documentation of that moment when I’m facing my biggest fears in real time. I have tried to remove the pictures from my mind and transform them too a piece of paper hanging on a wall. A dead material that can’t hurt me anymore. Sometimes it has helped and sometimes not. I grew up in a family that fled from Iran as political refugees. My dad was a fighter pilot in the army in Iran but when we fled to sweden his authority got crumbled. He was no longer the man he used to be. Something dark had entered his soul. This dark cloud of anger, hate, and violence spread across my whole childhood and left me scarred and filled with anxiety and obssesive thoughts. The first time I picked up a camera and started documenting my life at the age of 16 something woke inside of me. A feeling of power came to me. I didn’t feel that I was holding a piece of creative equipment. I was holding a weapon. This was the weapon that we’re going to give me the revenge I had sought after for so many years. I began studying in Sweden’s biggest art school and got obsessed with photography. I started photographing my parents as a part of a school assignment. I wanted to photograph my parents in the same way as I’d pictured them so many times. Dead. Murdered and dumped in the woods. Bloody and dirty bodies with pale skin and blood red eyes. My parents did it together with me. The project became an exhibition called To Mom, Dad and my two brothers. It consisted of photographs but also a very deeply personal text about my hate and anger towards my parents. They came to the exhibition and saw and read everything. They didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either. Everything I wanted to say to them was screaming at them from the images on the white walls. I continued to do these kind of projects but shifted towards using myself and actors In the projects. I wanted to recreate all of these morbid and obsessive images that was planted in my mind from my childhood.