Who are The Seasick?

The Seasick is an art group based in a village near Shahsavar, a small coastal town in northern Iran. We work together on multiple creative visual arts, writing, music, and film making projects. The distinctive feature of our group is that we turn traditionally individualistic forms of art like painting into collaborative projects. Our focus so far has mostly been on picture books and paintings; however, we never limit ourselves in terms of the media we will be choosing for our next projects. For instance, our current project, House of the Seasick, is our first installation, a rural townhouse transformed into a canvas for The Seasick to expand the limits of group work. No stone is left unpainted and no surface inside or outside the house is considered off-limits, which has presented the group with many new creative possibilities. We are also creating sculptures as part of the installation, using our dry rubbish and paper-mashe, which is great fun and has also reduced our dry waste to zero. You can check it all out in our short video above.

Why are we fundraising?

The Seasick was founded with the view to explore and promote artistic collaboration as well as support local artists. The Seasick aims to fill a gap in the existing government and private services for local artists by providing space and materials in order for them to be able to start, carry on, or further develop their group art projects. There are currently 8 artists working on several projects including House of The Seasick, but the premise of The Seasick is that like-minded artists are always welcome to join us for new projects.

We highly value freedom of expression, experimentalism, improvisation, and being open to new ideas. As the strict censorship laws in Iran are extremely limiting and oppressive, the need for places where artists can express themselves freely and experiment openly is felt all the more strongly. This also means that in order to stay true to our values we need to be able to maintain our independence.

Our future goals are to publish our picture books and graphic novels, create more public installations, publish music albums, and produce short movies and animations. We are also in the process of launching our group website in the near future. But most importantly, we want to set up a more central and easily accessible art studio, for which we have already chosen the name "The Seasick Art Factory". The studio will be located in Shahsavar, which will solve the current commuting problem and allow more local artists to join us.

The Seasick has so far been financed by its Adelaide-based representative, Elaheh Mahdavi. While the aim is for The Seasick to become a financially self-sufficient group, none of our ongoing projects have yet reached the point of being profitable, and our strong belief in free expression and uncensored art means that seeking support from Iranian government organisations is not an option. We had two options: quit, or look for support. So we had the idea to try crowd fundraising on Go Get Funding, which we are very excited about because it is also a way for us to share our art with people all around the world for the first time.

We are truly and immensely grateful for your support, and we would like you to know that it will make a huge difference in the lives and future of our local artist community. Here we present a few examples of each reward item we are offering as a token of our gratitude, but there are numerous more available, and you can see more examples in our video above, or on our Instagram and Twitter pages. Every handmade work we send out will be one of a kind. Please note that depending on the reward you choose and the country you live in it might take a while for you to receive your reward.