Talk

Open Forum: Kasra Jalilipour – Inventing Lost Archives

Kasra Jalilipour works with sculpture as a tool to reimagine and invent lost archives, artefacts and relics related to shrine cultures and rituals. For them this is a political act of queer resistance, honouring historic or fictional queer ancestors and providing knowledge for queer ancestors of the future.

They write: “My research considers how gender segregated communities, often due to religious practices, may have been potential spaces for queer freedom to flourish, contrary to popular views that religion is only restricted and oppressed. I often use historical figures, who utilised religious spaces as places of refuge away from the patriarchy. For example the long histories of Sufi shrines in Asian countries, which only accommodated women attendees, often became a safe haven for these women.

The ‘sisterhood vow’ ritual, central to my recent solo show 'Gut Feelings 2.0', was a practice allowing two women to be 'temporarily married’ and therefore able travel to these shrines together as companions. Other examples that interest me are medieval European nunneries, and also beguinages, specific to Netherlands and Belgium, where the religious practices gave women who were uninterested in marriage, and therefore outcasts, a safe space to exist, gain independence. Using methodologies of speculative fiction, I use a queer lens when making work about these specific histories, I believe there is something inherently queer about going against the grain of society, which these women often did.”

Kasra Jalilipour

Kasra Jalilipour (they/them) is an Iranian artist, and writer, based in the UK. Their interdisciplinary practice takes on the forms of sculpture, installation, moving image, text, and live performance. Through a positive obsession with histories of otherness they use methods of speculation to rewrite and reshape lost histories. The visual language in their works is often inspired by Imageries and texts from cultural and religious practices in the middle-east and Europe.

Their solo shows include Gut Feelings 2.0; Grand Union (Birmingham), Reliquary; Gasleak Mountain (Nottingham), Beastly Love; Arcade-Campfa and Bay Art (Cardiff). and group exhibitions Deviant Ornaments; National Museum of Norway (Oslo), Tallisman; Cardion Arts (London), My Garden’s Boundaries are the Horizon; de Apple, (Amsterdam), Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts; Jackman Humanities Institute (Toronto), and Letter Like Shapes Word Like Sequences; Amanda Wilkinson Gallery (London).

The exhibition Deviant Ornaments is curated by Dr Noor Bhangu and is on view at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway November 27th 2025-March 15th 2026. The exhibition is accompanied by an interdisciplinary education and public programme curated by Håkon Lillegraven. Jalilipour is one of four artists with work commissioned for the exhibition.

Links

https://kasrajalilipour.com/
https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/exhibitions-and-events/national-museum/exhibitions/2025/skeive-ornament/
https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/exhibitions-and-events/national-museum/arrangementer/2026/1/symposium-orienting-desires/