Omid Kheirabadi (Tehran, Iran, 1992) is an artist and performer working and living in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His work is shaped through various mediums, working with multimedia installations, videos, prints, and performances. He has participated in group and solo exhibitions in several spaces such as Amsterdam (W139), The Hague (The Nest, Quarter, Page Not Found, De Helena), Leuven (Cas Co), Belfast (Banana Block), Rotterdam (Dakendagen festival, Slash gallery, Ubik), and Maastricht (ENSI). He has obtained an MFA in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art and a MA in Interior Architecture at the Maastricht academy of architecture.  Omid's work gets inspiration from the meeting of his life and political motivations. After finishing his artist residency in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he participated in the Research Academy in Zürich in October to work with Dana Yahalomi and Florian Malzacher in a week-long performance workshop on his research question; the correlations between resistance against the oppression of global capitalism and the performance art and its impacts on the performers.

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Omid’s area of research is humorously and confidently rooted in first-hand experiences and questions of global disparity in economics and legal status. He tackles questions of European (Western) hegemony, economic disparities, power, (artistic) labor, immigration, and discrimination head-on. His constant questioning of the State’s mechanisms of denial and distancing of the middle classes from the mechanisms of production yields interesting work. The established practice of centering his own experiences is committed and the growing string of hourly fast-food jobs and services, pop culture, and the performer’s body/character is relevant and grants easy access to all these topics. The results of the questions: What is a body? and What mechanisms define/restrict/ a (working) citizen? Have been realized in a number of brilliantly impactful pieces each time analyzing the positions, agencies, and responsibilities of an artist, a service provider, an international student, or a foreigner.

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