Yaas Nikpour | "It's My Turn! No Other Chance to Survive!": Electric Room 39/50

Dastan is pleased to announce “It’s My Turn! No Other Chance to Survive!”, a presentation by Yaas Nikpour at Electric Room. The installation which is comprised of silk-screen prints and two videos will be open to public view from July6 to July 11, 2018.
In August 2014, a harassment campaign started against several women in the video game industry. The campaign became to be known as #GamerGate or The Gamergate Controversy. The predominantly-male supporters of #GamerGate claimed there was unethical collusion between the press and feminist critics/activists, progressives, and social critics. This view has caused many to see the campaign as a classic culture war from conservatives against progressive approaches in the gaming industry.
#Gamergate is not the single example of male violence in the video game industry, but in a more broader sense it can be classified as an instance of the viewer actively participating in the inflicted violence while keeping their distance from the actual violence and its victim. While the existence of Red Rooms is controversial, they are more extreme examples of a similar effect.
Yaas Nikpour (b. 1992, Tehran, Iran) is a graduate of Painting from Tehran University of Art (Tehran, Iran). Following her interest in video games, by altering the posters of some of the most well-known games, Yaas Nikpour has tried to appropriate these images to her own life and surroundings. Replacing the male figures with the normally-sidelined female figures and using silk-screen printing techniques, she has created a series of new video-game-poster-style works that portray her own protagonists.
The installation at Electric Room creates a full-on game experience: the viewer encounters real people in a ‘mission’, i.e. an act, in which ‘the real’ has been taken so much into play that the elements seem almost completely virtual, causing the viewer to conveniently remain free from making any choices.