The Moving Arts Collective is excited to present Spectatorship, a solo exhibition by Iranian artist Amir Khashayar Ghasemi. This exhibition is part of our collective’s ongoing commitment to showcasing powerful contemporary voices from around the world, whose work resonates with political, cultural, and aesthetic urgency.

Amir Khashayar Ghasemi is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, video art, and filmmaking. Deeply rooted in the cultural, historical, and political landscape of Iran, his work navigates the complexities of memory, ideology, absence, and representation. With a visual language that is both poetic and subtle, Ghasemi explores the afterimages of history and belief — the lingering traces of what once was, and the illusions we construct in their absence.

In Spectatorship, Ghasemi turns his gaze inward to examine the very act of looking. This body of work reflects on the psychological and political weight of prolonged observation — how repetition transforms images into ghosts, how witnessing becomes a form of captivity. The exhibition explores the idea that spectatorship is not passive, but an active, sometimes painful engagement with the world; one that distorts, erodes, and redefines what we think we see.

As he writes in his exhibition statement:

“Spectatorship, to me, is a condition — a wound caused by excessive watching, by staring too long, and by constantly returning to the same images and moments... Perhaps these works are my attempt to document this very state — to depict a world that, through the repetition of looking, begins to fracture and lose its reality.”

The artworks are hand-printed on used paper, mostly sourced from everyday objects such as calendars. Spectatorship invites audiences in Jersey to engage with a body of work that challenges perception and reveals the fragile line between seeing and understanding.