Atoosa Pour Hosseini makes film, performance, photograph, sculpture and installation to explore the influence of history and culture on the perception of reality and illusion. Her work examines several recurring themes relating to location, reflection, alienation and her relationship with her surroundings. Her projects aim to create a contemporary dialogue and forge new links between distinct geographical and cultural zones, producing an enriched, expanded, and amplified experience of being in the world. The trope of the alien view caused by immigration, referencing Atoosa’s own personal experience, alienation and displacement, has been a consistent feature, a metaphor for questioning the ways the moving image makes the world seem strange – and how familiar that strangeness has become.
Her work with the material textures of 8mm and 16mm film as well as digital processes to explore layers of space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition with startling interruptions, set adrift on an ineffable current of memory. Atoosa uses found objects for their symbolic potential or emotional value as figurative forms shaped by processes of reproduction and translation. Their combination and arrangement in the work invite viewers to question the relationship between systems of representation and our understanding of the world.
Visit Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s website here
January – December 2026
Practice: Film & Video / Visual Arts / Photography / Performance
Research Focus
Current research by Atoosa brings into dialogue headless sculptures of women scattered across European cities, figures whose fragmented forms evoke a legacy of silencing and gendered violence. These sculptures bear witness to a history in which the female form was both idealised and suppressed. They are relics of a Europe that once hunted women as witches and feared the power of the female body. They stand as silent witnesses in stone. Her research proposition asks: What lies in the space between presence and absence? Between monument and memory? Between dismembered bodies and living voices? While on residency she hopes to create a work where silence and voice, grief and imagination, become entwined, where the displaced body may begin to speak again.
More about the Dwell Here Residency
Dwell Here offers participants a simple proposition: to commit to this time and place while thinking deeply about its urgencies. Together we are curious to learn what can be activated or challenged through the process of dwelling. IMMA encourages reflection across the following themes to consider geographical, historical, political and cultural concepts of Ireland as a starting point to expand and connect international contexts through similarities and differences:
Technologies of Peace – to consider commemorative landscapes and memories of peace (as a dream, movement, or value) while generating perspectives on sustainable coexistence.
The Irish Paradigm – Welcomes artistic research that creates intimacy and connections, while celebrating the perceived agility and freedoms of operating on the periphery. As a small island on the edge of Europe, Ireland often has a challenging relationship with ‘the centre’.
The Museum as a Site of Vibration – consider how the museum and site can create new vibrations and rhythms within the built legacy of empire. How can museums make visible cultural shifts, including erased, censored or marginalised histories, as well as sustainability, planetary care, sharing and hospitality.