Born 1979 in Tehran, Elika Hedayat lives and works between Paris and Tehran. Arriving in France in 2004, she was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Annette Messager's studio, from wich she graduated with the Jury's congratulations in 2008.
For her works, Elika Hedyat often uses testimonies and experimental documentaries stage in a dreamlike and imaginary universe. Her stories are contemporary and her characters are real. All of her works revisits historical references, transferring them to the field of personnal experience, mainly using the various possibilities of her repertoire as a narrative document and memory retrieval tool. Reality, memory and imagination come together in a personal story under different forms : drawing, video, documentary, painting and performance.
"For years, in my artistic approach and in my drawings, I have been staging an imaginary world as desired by an ideological power system in search of utopia. A system which is however fascinated by modernity, technology and the media and which would like to use them to one day arrive at this world which it considers to be perfect. In my work, we see this ideological system becoming deformed, mutilated. By dint of wanting to realize utopia, it gives birth to a chaotic world, a dystopia. In my drawings, the human figure is sometimes intertwined with the animal and the animal with the plant. Sexuality, the relationship to the body and to sex, power, submission, domination are the hard cores of my work."