Name: Kaya Behkalam
Place of Birth: Berlin, Germany
Year of Birth: 1978
Areas of Work: Video, Photography, Installation, Text
Website:  www.kayabehkalam.net

Kaya Behkalam is an artist and filmmaker of German-Iranian origin, born in Berlin in 1978. He is living in Cairo since February 2011, teaching studio and theory classes in photography, time based media and curating at the Department of Visual Culture of the American University Cairo. He is a PhD Candidate in Fine Arts at the Bauhaus University Weimar/Germany, after perceiving his Diploma in Visual Communications and his MFA in Media Art at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK) as a Meisterschüler of Maria Vedder.

He is the co-founder of the artist group RELOADING IMAGES, an initiative that works on collective projects of artistic research. Past projects were set in Berlin and Tehran (2007), Damascus (2008), Bangalore (2011), Izmir and Cairo (2012). 2009 the group published the book „Damascus: Tourists, Artists, Secret Agents“(Greenbox/Prince Claus Library).

His video-, installation- and text-based works explore the entanglements of historiography, image politics and language, as in his current long term research project SEEING HISTORY, which explores archival practices and changing medialities of the historical in the context of post-revolutionary Cairo.

Among other places his works have been shown at the HKW and Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Queens Museum New York, Townhouse Gallery Cairo, Reina Sofia Museum Madrid, Azad Gallery Tehran, Kunstverein Heidelberg, the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, IDFA Amsterdam and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. His most recent film Excursions in the Dark has been awarded with the Dialogue Award 2012 at the European Media Art Festival EMAF Osnabrück.