The Art / Life of Caveh Zahedi
Shows about shows, documentation of documentaries, intertextual love affairs, and self-reflexive experiments ending in divorce. Caveh Zahedi revels in the real-life consequences of making your life your art.
By Chelsea Hopper
Issue 4, Summer 2025
Filmmaker, diarist, narcissist, rabble-rouser, self-saboteur, punkster, scholar, teacher, student, father-figure, bodhisattva, and my friend.
— Eleonore Hendricks, actor, 2024
Caveh Zahedi has always surpassed the conventional definition of “filmmaker.” His ongoing self-exposure, conceptual structures, and durational projects align as much with performance and video art as with cinema. His practice, then, should be understood as an artistic one: a sustained investigation of the self and of representation in dialogue with art history rather than merely adjacent to it. Zahedi belongs not just to the history of independent film but to a longer avant-garde tradition preoccupied with the collapse of art and life.
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The Art / Life of Caveh Zahedi by Chelsea Hopper is featured in full in Issue 4 of Memo magazine.
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