SasaHara Ghanem-Chaney (French-Algerian, 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Paris and based in Amsterdam since 2017. With a background in public space art management, and cultural economics they worked in the cultural field as a public programmer, exhibition producer and fundraiser.
They moved to Amsterdam to become the assistant of the artist masharu. Since 2020 they have developed their own artistic practice around multimedia queer storytelling. Between 2022 and 2024 they studied at the Sandberg Instituut in the program re:master opera, exploring experimental music theater forms.
SasaHara's work looks at fantasy storytelling as a tool to document the queer experience. Their practice combines elements of text, music, installation and performance. They find inspiration in ancient mythologies and transforms them in order to allow queer narratives to be a part of it, through fantasy and speculation. A large part of their approach is informed by the critical fabulation theory of Sadiya Hartman, with a focus on the gaps of the archived history of queer voices. Looking at the impact of myths, folklores and legends on the contemporary imaginary landscapes, SasaHara creates poetic fables centring queer emotions in a process of archiving the unheard.
Their current research focuses on the act of choiring as a spiritual practice for queer people to connect together in the present as well as to their ancestors and futurities. The work that sprouts from this research brings together the writing of a mythology, music making, an exploration in interactive sound sculpture making, the archiving of queer voices, and a general reflection on the relationship of queerness to time.
