Saba Raissian is an interdisciplinary artist from Tehran and an MFA candidate in Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Working across performance, video, installation, and interactive systems, her practice examines femininity, intergenerational memory, displacement, political erasure, and the body as an archive shaped through lived and inherited histories.
Becoming Archive gathers a series of time-based works developed over three years. Performance, installation, moving image, and computational systems are brought into one spatial condition. The exhibition is structured through ongoing political realities, where the body holds and carries the effects of power, violence, and survival.
The memorial installation addresses state violence in Iran as democide and, in its scale and continuity, as genocide. More than 36,000 lives have been taken; many remain unrecorded. Names are held within the work as a partial archive. Reading becomes a physical act. Presence is required. The X-ray installation presents medical images of bodies marked by gunfire. Bullet fragments remain inside tissue, often permanently. The body carries the material trace of violence within its structure. Industrial metal enters organic flesh and stays. Over time, it settles, integrates, and becomes inseparable from the body that holds it. The body itself performs the role of documentation.
Crustose brings intergenerational material into the space through family archive. Images of my grandmother in the 1960s register a different condition of visibility and bodily presence prior to revolutionary rupture. The shift that follows is inscribed directly onto the body. Petroleum operates here as a structuring force shaping political conditions, regulating space, and determining how the feminine body appears, moves, and exists. These transformations are carried forward as embodied memory rather than distant history.
The digital works operate through live collage systems. In Living Mask, a webcam-based structure converts audience bodies into active image- forming elements. Movement reveals, interrupts, and reorganizes visual layers in real time. The body enters the image and reshapes it continuously. The audience functions as interface, producing composition through presence. This approach engages frameworks from performance and media theory. Perform, Repeat, Record positions the body as a site of production through action and duration. Lev Manovich’s writing on digital media informs the understanding of the screen as a layered and responsive surface. Steve Dixon’s analysis of digital performance situates the body within technological systems where presence generates instability. These ideas operate here through practice, where the body remains material, political, and active within both physical and digital conditions. Across the exhibition, all elements remain in relation. Material, image, code, and action circulate through the same system. The body is used, marked, extended, and reorganized across these conditions.
Performance: Elegy 4
Live performance at 8:00 PM
