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Everyday Practice

Elsa Hashemi

She/Her
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Department

Visual Art & Art History

Program

Visual Arts - MFA

Graduate Year

2027

Specialities

Interdisciplinary Art / Performance / Photography

Everyday Practice is a series of 30 images - one for each day of a month - developed during a particularly difficult period in my life, when I began thinking about how to remain present and resistant within ongoing hardship. In these staged self-performances, I position my body as a stand-in for the everyday subject, layering it with familiar objects, gestures, and emotions drawn from daily life. Each image acts as a prompt: a small, deliberate interruption within routine, accompanied by a caption that proposes an overlooked but necessary practice.

Rather than focusing on productivity or efficiency, the work turns to what is often ignored - minor, non-typical actions that accumulate meaning over time. Through repetition, these gestures become a form of knowledge-building: a way of understanding life not through singular events, but through sustained attention to the ordinary. The use of unconventional, everyday materials - objects usually taken for granted - pushes against aesthetic expectations, suggesting that transformation does not require distance from life, but a deeper engagement with it. Across the series, meaning is not fixed in any single image; it emerges gradually, shaped by duration, reflection, and the persistence of practice.