Marjan Moghaddam
Digital art innovator Marjan Moghaddam uses a unique style of 3d CG figuration and animation to explore digital embodiment for both traditionally curated art exhibitions and commissions and as interventions. For her interventions, she visually hacks her digital artworks into art fairs and gallery shows, as a means of democratising exhibition spaces, while engaging in a thought-provoking and critical discourse.
Elizabeth Richardson | Ed Cristina Brooks | 11 May 2021
Marjan Moghaddam is an award-winning digital artist and animator who primarily works in computer graphics (CG) and digital 3D. She is internationally recognised for her original style of figuration that merges the ideals of sculpture and animation. Moghaddam defines this unique approach to the digital embodiment as Chronometric Sculpture. She has a prolific exhibition history that spans four decades, notably exhibiting at the Smithsonian.
Her influential #arthacks concept is an ongoing collection of interventions that have been exhibited on Instagram since 2016. With these interventions, she actively engages in social and political critical discourse, seeking to democratise curation as well as exhibition spaces by visually hacking found footage of art fairs, galleries and museums. Moghaddam lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is a Tenured, Full Professor of CG, Animation and mixed reality (XR) at Long Island University.
Current Event
24 January 2022, NFT Auction Code Green: Marjan Moghaddam joined 12 female digital artists who created NFTs for this charity fundraising event by World Economic Forum/Davos, World of Women NFT, hosted on Superrare.
It will fund a 8000km green wall in Africa which is creating green jobs for women while protecting fragile ecosystems. WEF & UN have been broadcasting it on all their channels.
In partnership with @worldofwomennft, @CodeGreen_nft, @1TFund, @wef & @WEFUpLink and hosted on @SuperRare
© Courtesy of the artists participating: @lanadenina, @amber_vittoria, @izzakko, @AlexaMeadeArt, @Swopes, @TheMarjan, @serwah_attafuah, @Zhuk_live, @shavonnewong_, @DongluYu, @Innamodja and @YKarkai
What’s next?
Profoundly committed to support women and the environment, Marjan Moghaddam will take part in a few key events such as the Green Code NFT Auction for Women in Africa, this 24 January 2021.
Other occasions to experience Marjan’s work IRL, in:
- Jan 2021, presenting the new orange blue Goddess at #NFTParis, FR.
- Feb 2022, the Carbon Clean Tezos NFT show with VerticalCrypto in Frieze LA, US.
- Mar 2022, Metaverse Fashion Week art exhibition in Decentraland with premium brands.
- Apr 2022, NFT Art show at a new space in West Broadway, NYC, US
- A solo show (date tbc) with curator Coco Dollo in Greenpoint Brooklyn, US.
Marjan Moghaddam, #GlitchGoddess Duo in the Metaverse in Blue & Orange. NFT minted & sold to private collection on 2/3/22 curated & hosted by @verticalcryptoart @ Courtesy of the artist
Marjan Moghaddam, #arthacks during ArtBasel Miami (2021) @ Courtesy of the artist
Did you know?
Moghaddam is completed a public art commission for the upcoming Digital Sculpture Trail at Hillsborough Castle Forest Park in Northern Ireland. This new media art trail features two pieces by Moghaddam: a physical sculpture of one of her signature glitched figures, as well as a permanent AR piece. She has been working on an AR story experience for the Healium AR app.
Featured Projects
#GlitchGoddess (2018)
Marjan Moghaddam, #ArtHack #GlitchGoddess during Frieze London (2021), © Marjan Moghaddam Courtesy of the artist.
Moghaddam’s #GlitchGoddess was born out of her #arthack interventions, and first emerged in her Kavanaugh Haunted my Frieze London #ArtHack in 2018. #GlitchGoddess calls attention to feminist critical discourse and inequalities in the art world through hacking exhibition spaces. Like many of Moghaddam’s #arthacks, GlitchGoddess interventions are frequently created and posted while art fairs are happening, giving her only a couple of days to create a concept, render it, and upload it to social media. Moghaddam explains that this timeframe encourages her to be spontaneous and apply a creative stream-of-consciousness approach to her work.
GlitchGoddess occupies XR; she emerges in hybridised spaces of possibility, digital embodiment and transformational critical discourse. Through Chronometric Sculpture and 3dCG figuration, Moghaddam’s figures embody both plasticity and digital aesthetic of glitch. “She is animated between slender, heavy, young, old, pregnant, curvy, stylised and also abstract,” Moghaddam explains in an interview with the website Art Spiel.
Moghaddam’s #arthacks frequently feature music, memes and voiceovers in addition to digital bodies. The Glitched Goddesses With Portrait of Picasso & Wood #arthack of Art Basel Miami in 2018 included the voices of artists Jillian Mayer, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Joan Semmel, Faith Ringgold and Barbara Zucker from a documentary about inequality in the art world. “It’s been an ongoing battle,” one artist says. “Every woman has stories of being excluded,” says another. These voiceover extracts merge to create a dialogue that follows the Glitch Goddesses through the Art Basel Miami exhibition space.
Glitched Goddesses With Portrait of Picasso & Wood amassed over three million views on Moghaddam’s public Facebook page, and millions of additional views through other top Net art channels. Cumulatively, GlitchGoddess now has over 18 million views. Moghaddam’s work has sparked conversations about the body, sexuality and inequality, and she has since used comments on #arthack posts as voiceovers for various AR activations at curated.
Every GlitchGoddess possesses a dialogue of embodiment and individual art-historical intervention. A recurring figure in Moghaddam’s practice is Glitched Odalisque, a digital embodiment that responds to the harem girl fantasy of nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings. Glitched Odalisque reclaims the gaze of white male European painters, taking full command of her sexuality. As Moghaddam highlights in an art talk shared on her Instagram, “glitching her was playing with that idea of sexuality. Her sexuality isn’t about ‘I want you to want me.’” She adds, “Her sexuality is: ‘I glitch the hell out of myself if I feel like it.’” exhibitions.
Marjan Moghaddam, Glitched Goddesses With Portrait of Picasso & Wood at Art Basel Miami #ArtHack (2018). © Marjan Moghaddam Courtesy of the artist.
Marjan Moghaddam, Lordess Drop with Red & Teale (2021) © Courtesy of the artist.
Marjan Moghaddam, Non-Binary Nude Glitch at Gagosian Gallery show The Nude: from Modigliani to Currin” #ArtHack (2016), © Marjan Moghaddam Courtesy of the artist.
Non-Binary Nude (2016)
Moghaddam’s hack of the Gagosian’s landmark Nude: From Modigliani to Currin exhibition in 2016 sought to interrogate why in a survey show that traced the nude through 100 years of art history until the 21st century, there was no representation of a non-binary or digital nude. Moghaddam also hacked the Non-Binary Nude at The Armory Show, New York, in 2017. The same figure was then also hacked into other art fairs such as outside of Bryce Wolkowitz’s booth at Armory 2017 with the art dealer in the background, and then exhibited as an animated painting, Non-Binary Nude Glitch in Field of Fractal and Generative Filigrees, as part of the Post Identity pavilion of The Wrong Digital Art Biennial, 2017.
Marjan Moghaddam, Taking The Knee Art Basel 2020 #ArtHack (2020), © Marjan Moghaddam Courtesy of the artist.
Taking The Knee in Solidarity (2020)
Taking The Knee is a recent digital embodiment #arthack of Art Basel 2020. It was made in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement that began in the US in 2013 as a response to police brutality. It was originally posted to social media while the fair was taking place in June. The sound art accompanying the Chronometric Sculpture is also by Moghaddam. The Crypto Art version replaced the original artwork on the Art Basel page with all GAN-generated art, and has since sold into the primary and secondary NFT art markets on Superrare.
Key achievements
Moghaddam has exhibited print and sculpture triggered AR projects of her #arthacks at galleries and international festivals. In 2018, two of her Chronometric Sculpture AR art installations were exhibited at the Smithsonian and Washington National Cathedral as a part of the By the People Arts Festival, commissioned by the Halcyon Arts Foundation and curated by Artechouse.
Her #arthacks were shortlisted for the International Digital Sculpture Prize in 2017, with an AR exhibition of the Winners at Ulm Museum, Germany. She has received numerous grants for her pioneering work, including the Rockefeller Fund, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, Brooklyn Arts Council and the Experimental Television Fund. In 2019 Moghaddam featured in the Forbes Top AR Apps, Installations and Activations List for her #arthacks. She has been an official selection of the Siggraph Computer Animation Festival four times.
In 2019 Moghaddam was an official AR Adobe artist-in-residence for Project Aero. More recently, she was featured in the 2021 BBC Click documentary, When Art Goes Digital.
Recent shows
Solo Shows
2021, The Digital Embodiments and Interventions of Marjan Moghaddam, MoCDA
2014, SONICA Series, The Yard, curated by IFAC, LES, NY, US
2019, Piramit Sanat Art Center İstanbul, Turkey
2013, Of Revolutions, LACDA, Los Angeles, US
Group shows / Festivals / NFTs and Crypto
2021, Transformations NFT Art show, Unit London, UK
2021, Digital Sculpture Trail (permanent), Hillsborough Castle Forest Park, Hillsborough, Northern Ireland
2021, Graffiti Queens, Vegas City Skatepark Gallery, Decentraland
2021, F*ck Wall Street, Stellabelle’s Museum, Cryptovoxels, Online exhibition
2020,Forget What You Already Know, Art of Our Century Gallery, New York, US
2019, City Unseen 2.0, Snap Orlando Art Center, Orlando Florida, US
Museums or Fairs
2022, Carbon Clean Tezos NFT show with VerticalCrypto in Frieze LA
2021, Intersecting Glitched Venus, Superrare and Superworld AR art exhibition, Art Basel Miami
2021, Glitch Odalisque and GAN Trekker, Female Creators Week with Rarible as part of Art Basel Miami week
2019, Istanbul Contemporary Art Fair, Istanbul Turkey
2019, Main Pavilion, The Wrong Digital Art Biennial
2019, Make It Immersive, Adobe Festival of the Digital Arts, New York, US
2018, Halcyon, By The People Arts Festival, Smithsonian and Washington National Cathedral, Washington DC, US
2017, Post Identity Pavilion, The Wrong Digital Art Biennale
