Emancipation

Interactive multimedia installation, mixed media and hand-painted porcelain tile, 2016–2017

Emancipation is an interactive multimedia installation in the form of an 8-foot cubed, windowless chamber, created by Aida Izadpanah as the 2017 Artist in Residence in the College of Arts, Culture, and Humanities at Stony Brook University in New York. The interior is painted in Izadpanah’s signature mixed media style to suggest ancient walls, while the exterior is aged and detailed in her hand-painted and fired porcelain tiles, evoking Middle Eastern design.

Visitors are enclosed one by one inside the chamber, where interactive lighting and music effects rise and fall — offering a brief but intense experience in which to contemplate the project’s allusions to mass incarceration, intolerance, and the liberating power of love.