LA Road Concerts “By Any Other Name”

By Any Other Name, (2018) is a video installation originally created for a public Pacific Standard Time salon, in Culver City, CA. The artwork, whos’ title echoes Shakespearean literature and an episode of the famed 1960’s TV series, Star Trek, manifests audible language as a cyclical yet fractured device capable of classification, affirmation, and misinformation. 

Being of Iranian decent the artist, Joshua Hashemzadeh, plays to a relationship between the body and the spoken word. The video focuses on an increasingly menacing portal of the artists mouth as it annunciates synonyms for the word “terror” or “terrorism,” a label almost exclusively reserved by American media for those of Middle Eastern/ North African descent. Created in response to acts of domestic violence such as school shootings, police brutality, and racial persecutions, the artist contemplates ways in which different bodies hold varied connotations.