Undying – Parasto Backman

Undying, with works by Parasto Backman, Madeleine Aleman and Lilian Steiner, revolves around how art can attempt to give form to that which is difficult to define, verify, or explain through rational means. Undying departs from the human desire to establish and sustain connections with what is no longer present: the dead, lost languages and forms of communication, bodily memories and accumulated physical experiences that are fleeting, and sensations that elude rational understanding.

Parasto Backman, senior lecturer at Konstfack, takes interest in language and inheritance as notions through which to explore migration, memory, and loss. Her work in Undying, which she describes as a play with diasporic language, departs from Nastaliq, a historic Iranian form of calligraphy that has become, for Backman, a way of approaching languages, cultural heritage, and traditions and knowledge at risk of being lost. The work emerged following the death of her father and has developed as a way of processing grief through writing, gesture, and embodied experience.

Drawing on this tradition, Backman develops a visual and bodily language of her own, in which the lines of writing gradually loosen themselves from their original context. Through shifts, repetitions, and movement, they are transformed into expressions that carry traces of both inheritance and loss. Her work moves between the material and embodied dimensions of language, exploring how meanings change as they are carried across generations, geographies, and cultural contexts. For Backman, language and movement become tools for working through sustaining connections across time, place, and generations.