Specatorship
An exhibition by Amir Khashayar Ghasemi
1–30 October 2025 | Link Gallery, Jersey Museum and Art Gallery | 10am - 5pm | Free Admission
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 film making. 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.
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.
Artist Statement - Amir Khashayar Ghasemi
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. I have looked so much that I’m no longer sure what I’m seeing: reality, or something constructed in my mind through sheer repetition.
In this process, not only do I become worn out, but the subjects and events themselves begin to change. They slowly detach from their original truth and function, transforming into something else — something no longer defined by their own essence, but by my gaze. Sometimes I feel that what I see no longer exists; it’s merely a shell of being, trapped in my view.
For me, spectatorship is a kind of captivity — captivity within the gaze. A place where my eyes cannot let go, and the world is endlessly consumed in this obsessive act of watching. 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.