The M.F.A Thesis Shows: Christopher Lee & Asma Khoshmehr
December 2 – December 5
Emerson’s Master’s in Fine Arts candidates, Christopher Lee and Asma Khoshmehr share deeply personal stories of their family’s past, interpreted through new media.
This exhibition will have a reception on December 5th from 6-8pm.
Memory Lost by Christopher Lee
Memory Lost is a multimedia installation that probes the fragile nature of human memory through the lens of AI generated media. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s personal experience witnessing his grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, this work explores the parallels between artificial intelligence and human cognition. The installation revisits formative moments from the artist’s life from childhood through adulthood, using AI to reconstruct and reinterpret these memories.
By highlighting the biases and limitations of both AI and human recollection, the piece invites viewers to contemplate the ephemeral quality of our lived experiences. Memory Lost serves as a poignant meditation on mortality, loss, and the imperfect mechanisms through which we preserve and recall our past, challenging us to consider the essence of what makes us human.
Throughout his artistic journey, Chris has been driven by an innate curiosity to acquire new knowledge, leading him to constantly push the boundaries of his creative toolkit. Early in life he explored drawing and painting before developing a deep affinity for music. By high school Chris had built up a home studio filled with guitars, synthesizers, and other gadgets. As an adult, Chris briefly explored a business career before realizing his true calling lay in creative work.
He enrolled in Emerson College’s Film & Media Art program to work with other artists and to find a personal and professional outlet for his creativity. Since then, Chris has contributed to dozens of student and independent projects, specializing in location sound recording, sound design, and mixing. His personal work leverages diverse digital technologies, reflecting his evolution from a young artist to a versatile multimedia professional adept at integrating multiple artistic disciplines.
Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar by Asma Khoshmehr
Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar is a multimedia installation that uncovers the silenced stories of forced child marriages and political persecution following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. The work explores a 1971 presidential decree that allowed officials to forcibly marry underage girls, including many women in the artist’s family. These policies led to deportation, imprisonment, confiscation of family properties, and decades of silence about the trauma endured. Asma, the first in her generation to uncover this hidden history, conducted years of research, discovering the secret stories of many women in her family impacted by these events. She traveled across Tanzania, Kenya, Oman, UAE, and Iran to gather testimonies, family documents, and archival records, piecing together her family’s survival through forced marriages, captivity, and eventual escape.
Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s storytelling to transform a vengeful king into a compassionate leader, Asma’s project reflects her hope to mirror Scheherazade’s journey. It combines archival materials, 3D laser scans, virtual reality experiences, and video art, exploring how storytelling can confront power and inspire transformation. By sharing these stories, this project reflects on how Scheherazade used storytelling to change a vengeful king, drawing attention to the tyrants of today who continue to use women’s bodies as tools of revenge in war and revolution.
Asma Khoshmehr is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work combines immersive storytelling, documentary filmmaking, and new media. With a BFA in Performing Arts and currently pursuing an MFA with a focus on new media, her practice draws deeply from her East African and Middle Eastern heritage, exploring themes of generational trauma, forced displacement, and political sexual violence.
Asma’s work has earned recognition through prestigious awards and residencies, including the MacDowell Fellowship, the MASS MoCA, Andrew Freedman Home (AFH), and the ON::VIEW Artist Residency. She has also received the Carole Fielding Grant from the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) and the Virgin Unite Grant. Her international journey includes a scholarship to study Beijing Opera at the Shanghai Theater Academy and mythology at Sanskriti Kendra in India.