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Biography

Helga Rabieh Fassonaki, a Los Angeles-born Iranian artist, curator, composer, and environmental justice activist, holds an MFA in Intermedia Art from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and certifications in Ecosystem Restoration Design and California Native Plant Landscaping. Helga performs solo as yek koo, integrating body movement, voice, and physio-acoustics of space as instruments of sound and duo as Metal Rouge with Andrew Scott, a no-wave informed practice. As an interdisciplinary artist, keyholder at Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA), and founder/facilitator/curator of untune, Helga’s practice embodies reinhabitation and reciprocity across culture, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and community-based learning.

Khal—a project initiated in Tabriz, Iran (2014)—consists of sixteen sculptural scores Helga created and sent to artists outside Iran to interpret and perform publicly, in response to her inability to do so as a woman in Iran. Khal has since been presented at LACA (Los Angeles), Glasshouse (Brooklyn), Audio Foundation (Auckland), and Disjecta (Portland), among others. In March 2020, Drawing Room Records  and Sming Sming Books published the Khal publication, which is now part of collections including the Laurel Doody Library Supply, Samoa House Library, E H McCormick Library (New Zealand), Hirshhorn Library (Washington D.C.), CCS Bard (New York), Beta-Local (Puerto Rico), and Kandinsky Library (Pompidou).

Helga founded untune in 2017 as a socio-curatorial entity—beginning as an experiment dedicated to the term Social, and continuing today as an alternative learning format based on reciprocity and the repair of human-land relations.

Her ongoing 100’ Circles series investigates transitions and cycles—historic, socio-political, and environmental—across specific land masses, including Vancouver, Joshua Tree, the Berkshires, Cascina Lago Scuro and Rancho Arroyo Grande..

She is currently developing LaBor, a project focused on physically laborious engagement with land, questioning the language of “sustainability,” “regeneration,” “restoration,” and “amendment” as Western ecological frameworks that often imply a return to pre-settlement conditions. These terms are critically examined in light of the long-standing relationships Indigenous peoples have had with land—relationships often erased by the myth of wilderness and the logics of colonial science.

Helga’s work solo and in collaboration, has been presented at MOCA (Los Angeles), LACA (Los Angeles), Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the Whitney Biennial 2014), LACE galleries (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Audio Foundation (Auckland), Blue Oyster gallery (Dunedin), Box Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Disjecta (Portland), Zebulon (Los Angeles), Café Oto (London), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia) among many others.

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