KAOHSIUNG CITY.- How to Connect With Landscape is the title of both the solo exhibition and the expansive three-channel video installation of Parisa Karimi in KFMA. The exhibition brings together recent works that explore regeneration and healing as acts of resistance across postindustrial and postcolonial terrains—both internal and external.

Through multi-sensory and poetic approaches, Karimi creates embodied encounters between landscape and the body, tracing interconnections across ecological, emotional, and political dimensions. The video installation How to Connect With Landscape, realized in the Sápmi region of Sweden, investigates one of the world’s largest forest ecosystems—an essential global carbon sink. Under the pressures of industrial development and the climate crisis, Karimi follows the deep entanglements between humans and landscape through forests, industrial ruins, local ecologies, and community histories, revealing the enduring imprints of colonial extraction and environmental transformation.

Continuing her inquiry into environment and relationality, Karimi is currently expanding her research in Taiwan by following the paths of an aquatic plant marked as world's worst invasive species: the water hyacinth.

As an artist-in-residence at the Pier-2 Art Center in Kaohsiung, she began her new long-term artistic research titled Relationship Work with Water Hyacinth — a poetic and ecological investigation into ecosystems, love, and the forms of care that sustain them in a globally shifting world. The project traces the encounters and movements of the water hyacinth through tropical waterways, exploring the entanglements between humans and more-than-humans and questioning our understanding of nature, borders, and national identity. Her work reflects on global concerns, probing the interconnections of bodies in landscapes, while envisioning possibilities of regeneration and healing from over generation passed on wounds.

The Artist

Parisa Karimi is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose transdisciplinary practice explores sensorial, ecological, and philosophical questions between human and more-than-human bodies within postcolonial and industrialized landscapes.

Her practice weaves non-linear forms of storytelling with animation, collage, performance, film, olfactory compositions, sculpture, and installation to narrate multisensory stories of invisible or suppressed aspects of shared history. Her interests center on processes of unlearning binary categories and oppressive modes of thought, and in (re)learning decolonial and holistic approaches that open possibilities for radical imagination and for practicing shared presents and futures.

Grounded in site-specific research, her artistic inquiry employs anthropological methods of walking, archival work, and interviews, and involves collaborations with local communities. Her works intertwine documentary and speculative elements, using technologies such as interactive interfaces and projection mapping to create immersive environments and experiential spaces.

As the artistic director of RanGBarang Studio, she also collaborates on film and theatre productions. Her works have been presented at numerous international festivals.

Organizer

Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts × Pier 2 Art Center Artist-in-Residence Program