DAY BY DAY: Resistance from Within

Addressing social hierarchies and legal impositions from the lens of cross-cultural experience, Bita Razavi’s unique positionality as a migrant cultural worker within the Finnish and Baltic artistic contexts produces a body of work based on observation and analysis, leading to material formalizations. Day By Day traces the acts of doing, seeing, and resisting over long-term temporalities. Resistance from Within pays homage to daily acts that slowly chip away at power structures’ asphyxiating grasp.

Spanning fifteen years of practice, the selected works included in this book are organized into three modus operandi: Objects & Systems, Gesture & Access, and Strategies for Resistance. Razavi uses sociological research in artistic formats such as photographic series, sculptural works, and performative installations based on both receptive and active forms of information harvesting. Her practice is a long-term project that consistently engages with the histories of everyday collective struggles. The included works range from the artist’s earliest encounters with Finnish society as a student newly arrived from Tehran, through to the pieces presented in the Estonian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The publication closes with multi-media installations that link Razavi’s long-term interest in the subject of resistance with the ongoing socio-political revolution in Iran. 

This book is compiled by artist Bita Razavi and edited by curator Àngels Miralda. It contains text contributions by anthropologist Francisco Martínez, art and design historian Mo Bottomley, media theorist and art critic Mike Watson, and writer Brenda Tempelaar.