Game

Pegah Tabassinejad. Game [2 Vancouver]. digital film, colour, sound. 2022.

The Game projects interrogate the boundaries between performance, surveillance, and participatory agency, situating the body as both a site of control and a conduit for mediated interaction. By shifting authority to remote audiences, the work explores how digital spectatorship constructs, directs, and fragments embodied experience. These performances unfold in urban space, where the body becomes an avatar—simultaneously autonomous and subject to external command—blurring the lines between agency and submission, presence and absence, reality and simulation. In navigating these tensions, Game examines the infrastructures of power embedded within digital systems, questioning how virtual spectatorship reconfigures corporeal movement and spatial perception.

Game [2 Vancouver]:  A digital film documenting the live performance Game [2 Vancouver], in which the performer navigates Vancouver’s urban space as an avatar, controlled in real-time by a remote audience in the city. The work explores the interplay between surveillance, agency, and embodied experience, exposing the tension between virtual spectatorship and physical presence in public space. Credits: Film and Performance: Pegah Tabassinejad Curator: Mandana Mansoori (VIVO Media Arts) Technical Director: Jae Woo Kang (VIVO Media Arts) Performer: Pegah Tabassinejad Live Video: Aryo Khakpour Soundtrack: Hooman Hoorsan Mix and Master: Siavash Bastani Poster Design: Tevin Zadourian Subtitle and Translation: Aidin Raad Performed at VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver, BC, 2022 This project is generously supported by British Columbia Arts Council (+LOGO of BCAC)

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Game [3 Berlin/Tehran]:  A digital film documenting the live performance Game [3 Berlin/Tehran], in which one performer moves through Berlin and the other through Tehran, both navigating urban space as avatars controlled remotely by an audience in Berlin. The work examines the interplay of surveillance, agency, and embodied experience, revealing the tension between virtual spectatorship and physical movement across two distant cities. Credits: Film and Performance: Pegah Tabassinejad Curators: Maryam Palizban and Constanza Macras | DorkyPark Performers: Shahrbanou Rezaei (Tehran), Pegah Tabassinejad (Berlin) Technical Directors: Sohrab Samsam (Berlin), Taha Saraei (Tehran) Live Video: Baset Rezaei (Tehran), Shahab Anousha (Berlin) Original Soundtrack: Houman Hoursan New Edit, Mix and Master: Parsa Azarm Nia Live Translator: Baharan Eghbalzadeh Video Documentation: Golnaz Mohammadi Produced by the DorkyPark Company and Constanza Macras Performed at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, Germany, 2023 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. (+Canada Council for the Arts LOGO)

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Pegah Tabassinejad is an award-winning Interdisciplinary artist, educator, and wanderer living and working on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and Sel̓ íl̓ witulh peoples. Tabassinejad's new media practice primarily revolves around the construction of digital and live performances, film, video installations and city projects. Her practice acts as an interrogation on themes that include the intersection of digital and surveillance culture on identity, virtual and physical presences and absences, and the forces that structure and shape the movement and perception of marginalized and female bodies in private and public space.  Tabassinejad holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Simon Fraser University and a BA in Stage Direction from the Tehran University of Art. She also studied Visual Art at Azad University in Tehran. She has taught various studio and seminar courses at the Tehran University of Art, Bamdad International House, Barg Institute, and Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in addition to leading workshops internationally. Her work has been exhibited internationally at prestigious venues and festivals such as Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, Dancing on the Edge Festival in the Netherlands, Push Festival–PushOff in Vancouver, and IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam. She has also held the Phil Lind Multicultural Artist Residency at UBC and participated in residencies with The Wooster Group, Battery Opera, and Left of Main - Plastic Orchid Factory. Her latest projects include Entropic Fields of Displacement (IDFA DocLab – Amsterdam, VIVO Media Arts – Vancouver, 2024), Game [3 Berlin/Tehran] (Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz – Berlin, 2023), and Game [2 Vancouver] (VIVO Media Arts – Vancouver, 2022).