>> QAARQOOB: HOW DO YOU DANCE WITH YOUR MOTHER?
2026 <<
A multidisciplinary graduation project comprising film, thesis publication, installation, sound, and durational performance.
nAmin
HE/THEY
Dutch/Queerdish, 1991
ig @ nowimiin
namin.me
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amin Mohammadaliei, also working as nAmin, is a visual artist and filmmaker working across cinema, performance, installation, sound, writing, and image-making. Their practice examines how bodies are shaped by family, migration, religion, memory, and political systems—and how movement can become a form of knowledge, resistance, and transformation.
After beginning in Fashion at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amin continued in VAV – Moving Image and the Art & Research Honours Programme, and after an exchange programme in Mexico City Centro Academy, continued developing a practice grounded in embodied research and political storytelling. Their work has been presented through public programmes and screenings, including UNCUT / Stedelijk Museum and EYE on Art.
Amin is continuing this research through the Master’s programme in Film at the Netherlands Film Academy.
>QQ< PROJECT OVERVIEW >QQ<
QaarQoob: How Do You Dance With Your Mother? is a multidisciplinary project about the frames a body inherits and the movements through which it attempts to live beyond them. The title grows from the Persian word chaharchoob, meaning “frame.” Here, the frame is both a physical structure and a political force: it can capture, hold, protect, organise, restrict, discipline, or be broken open.
The project asks: how does a body move within and beyond the frames of family, motherland, religion, gender, borders, institutions, and the state? “Mother” moves between the personal mother, the motherland, and the earth.
Developed through a year of field research and encounters with dancers and movers across different cultural and political contexts, QaarQoob approaches movement as a living archive. Through gesture, memory, conversation, rhythm, and bodily presence, movement becomes a means of survival, remembrance, resistance, and transformation.
The project brings together a two-channel documentary film, a thesis publication, a site-responsive installation, sound, ceramics, scenography, and a series of durational performances.
Magazine/thesis:
QQ — QaarQoob
Thesis publication, 76 pages, 2026
The thesis was developed alongside the film through travel, embodied observation, intimate conversations, and encounters with dancers and movers. It considers the frame as something that exists both around and inside the body, also something to be held: a structure through which family, religion, borders, gender, institutions, and political power are experienced, and a tool to capture them.
Rather than treating the people encountered during the research as subjects to be explained, the conversations became collaborative exchanges shaped by trust, movement, memory, and shared experience.
The publication brings together the written thesis with photographs, personal fragments, references, and documentation from the journey based on participants' interviews.
Documentary video work / short film:
QaarQoob: How Do You Dance With Your Mother?
Two-channel documentary film, 2026
The film brings together dancers and movers encountered during a year-long research journey across Latin America, South Africa, and Asia. Instead of using movement to illustrate spoken testimony, the film treats gesture, repetition, hesitation, rhythm, and stillness as forms of knowledge.
The participants appear as collaborators whose bodies hold personal and political histories. Their movements create fragmented portraits of migration, belonging, memory, violence, care, ancestry, and hope.
The film was screened at EYE Filmmuseum as part of the VAV-Graduation Film Festival in June 2026.
The film was also screened during the graduation show at the Rietveldacademie Theory/Action stairs, amongst other films by VAV graduates.
Installation:
Together We Form a Flower
Site-responsive installation, 2026
Glass Pavilion, Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Wood, soil, living plants, artificial grass, ceramics, metal pipes, smoke, light, sound, exposed structures, and two floor-mounted screens.
>> Together We Form a Flower << transforms the Glass Pavilion and the surrounding courtyard into an unstable landscape where natural, artificial, digital, and industrial materials meet.
An open grid of wooden frames extends across the pavilion and into the public space outside. The structure offers no fixed route. Visitors must decide whether to enter, avoid, touch, cross, or move around it. The floor-mounted screens do not function as conventional cinema screens; they become thresholds within the landscape, appearing at different moments as pools, windows, or dark reflective surfaces.
The installation was never fully under the artist’s control. Weather, movement, public use, and interruption continually altered its condition. Visitors rested, ate, played, left objects, moved materials, and created their own temporary situations within and around the work.
The installation therefore existed not as a finished object, but as a changing relationship between what was constructed, what was living, and what could not be contained, changed, and destroyed,
Durational performances during the graduation show 2026:
The installation changed throughout the five days of the graduation exhibition through a series of durational performances:
1 July — What If No One Celebrates King’s Day?
2 July — Artists Are Always Present
3–4 July — Shaking Frames
5 July — Ashes to Ashes, Bites the Dust
Through writing, cleaning, carrying, rearranging, dismantling, and burning, the performances gradually transformed the installation. What began as an authored structure became a shared and unstable situation shaped by the artist, performers, visitors, weather, and the surrounding institution.
The final actions did not return the installation to an empty or neutral space. Fragments, displaced plants, disturbed soil, ash, flowers, and broken frames remained as evidence of what had taken place.
CREDITS
Concept, artistic direction, film, installation, and text: Amin Mohammadaliei / nAmin
Thesis advisor: Peter Pover
Publication graphic design: Alyson Sillon
Illustration, page 2: Helena Theodore
Image, page 23: Angela Pagano
Photography: Jordi de Vetten; G. Carneiro, NEOA Studio; and nAmin
Film participants and collaborators are named in the complete film credits and Thesis.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With special thanks to Peter Pover, Jonas Vansteenkiste, Martin Grootenboer, and Hansje van Ooijen for their guidance and support throughout the development of QaarQoob.
PRESENTATION
Installation presented during the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Graduation Show, 1–5 July 2026.
Film screened at Eye Filmmuseum as part of EYE on Art, June 2026.
FUNDING AND SUPPORT
This project was made possible with support from:
Stichting Bekker-la Bastide-Fonds
Stichting Oukha
Berlagefonds
Fonds Kwadraat