Our residences

Yosra Mojtahedi

Yosra Mojtahedi was born in Tehran in 1986. A graduate of Le Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts, she explores the boundaries between the living and the non-living through sculptures that she conceives as hybrid, sometimes interactive, ‘human machines,’ combining soft robotics, emerging technologies, and organic materials. Coming from a country where the body is a taboo subject and its representation is forbidden, her works are sensual and sensory reactions: tactile, olfactory, sometimes touching on eroticism. By creating mutating, sensitive and breathing body forms, she breathes life into inert entities, blurring the boundaries between machine and flesh, human and non-human, real and unreal. Her works, often imbued with a political sensuality, reinvent narratives around femininity, technology and spirituality. Winner of the ADAGP Digital Art – Video Art Revelation Prize in 2020 and the François Schneider Foundation Contemporary Talents Prize in 2024, she regularly exhibits in France and internationally.

Yosra Mojtahedi initiates a new cycle of creation entitled L’Athanor, in reference to the alchemical furnace where the transm
utation of bodies and organs takes place. Hybrid forms emerge within it, between human, vegetal, and technological, in constant mutation. These “body-organs,” fragile and unsettling, inspired by bioart and soft robotics, question the boundaries between nature and machine. By integrating a spiritual dimension, the project brings forth an almost sacred presence, inviting us to transcend matter. L’Athanor thus becomes a space of thought, a chamber of slow combustion where a poetics of becoming unfolds, between shadow and light, chaos and form.