IMAGE - BODY
Screening and Conversation
Omolola Ajao and Zahra Babaei, moderated by Julianna Heller
This conversation examines tensions between identity and representation; body and surface; lived experience and performance. Omolola Ajao’s I Believe I Saw Aliens considers Black performance within white-dominated visual spaces, while Zahra Babaei’s Two Bodies probes the friction between the female body and the surface of the image. Through their material and media-based practices, both artists attend to how bodies are translated into images and mediated through screens, revealing what is altered, obscured, or amplified in the process.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Omolola Ajao
Omolola Ajao (b.Guyana) is an interdisciplinary artist working within film, video and theatre. Her recent short film, After Sunday premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She has held residencies & fellowships at UnionDocs, Nightwood Theatre & more. She is a 2023-2024 Whitney ISP Weitzen Studio Fellow and a 2024-2025 Sundance Adobe Ignite Fellow. She holds a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
Zahra Babaei
Born in Tehran in 1996, Zahra Babaei is an artist-researcher based in Rochester, New York. In her work, Babaei explores the materiality of technology, tactile perception, ritual, blending video, performance, and photography to look at the limits of visuality. Her practice is a discursive exploration of materiality, investigating how fabric mediates the body, carries tropes and stereotypes, and stretches across identity politics as well as geographic and historical boundaries. She is currently a PhD student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Zahra holds a BA in Photography from the University of Art, Tehran, and an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the Rochester Institute of Technology.