Artist Talk with Mahsa Attaran in Partnership with Cheshire Public Library
By popular demand, Ball & Socket Arts is bringing back a second date and time for our Artist Talk with Mahsa Attaran at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 12 at a new location, the Cheshire Public Library.
Please come hear directly from Iranian-born visual artist, Mahsa Attaran, about her work (on view now at Ball & Socket Arts). We will screen her film: Ja Oftadan at the start of the talk.
My Heart Is Bloodied For You will host additional gallery hours in the Workshop Gallery at Ball & Socket Arts at 493 West Main Street, Cheshire CT (just down the road from the library) to view her exhibition available on Thursday, March 12th from 2-6 pm, along with our regular gallery hours on March 13, 14 and 15 from 12-4 pm.
Ja Oftadan is a love letter to my maman and baba This book and short film project began with a suitcase full of spices, the ones I brought with me when I left Iran for the U.S. In the cold of North Dakota, they carried warmth. Each bag was labeled in my maman’s handwriting, with tiny doodles and tender instructions, as if she were whispering, “You’re not alone.” I couldn’t throw them away. They smelled like home. The first time we saw each other again, after more than three years, she came and made every dish vegan, just for me. The same recipes she’d taught me over the phone, her voice crackling across the ocean, guiding me through onions and turmeric. That voice became the narration for my short film, her stories of food, love, and longing holding the heart of the work. Ja Oftadan is made of two handmade books, a film, and the traces of her care: spices, recipes, rug-lined suitcases, and her voice. The main book opens like luggage velvet-wrapped and pocketed with scent. The smaller one holds photographs of the meals maman made, styled inside an open suitcase, always halfway between here and there. This is my archive of my parent’s love. A meditation on migration, memory, and the way parents can wrap their child in care, even from a continent away.
Mahsa Attaran is an Iranian-born visual artist, photographer, and educator whose work explores culture, gender, and belonging through memory, exile, and domestic archives. Working across photography, video, installation, and conceptual wearables, she often uses the archive to preserve and reframe women’s histories. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Iranian Artists Forum, Iranian Art Museum, Windsor Art Center, and Hartford Theatreworks, and has been featured in Hyperallergic.
As an Iranian woman in exile, Attaran is committed to witnessing and refusing silence in the face of political violence and human rights abuses. She also leads workshops and talks that encourage critical engagement with social justice, memory, and responsibility.
Attaran holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Connecticut and teaches on the Visual Arts faculty at The Loomis Chaffee School
