OK Pedersen is a photographer and filmmaker of Iraqi descent, now living in Montreal. As an image-maker, her work addresses the truth of the moment, the architecture of memory, and our relationship to the unseen. In her series Paper Monuments, she draws and erases architectural renderings of memory hyperspace––real places that are now only accessible by memory. The forms are drawn by hand on the same sheet of mylar before being photographed in the spring twilight, and then erased. By dramatizing the transformation of a single surface, the series emphasizes the muddied, ongoing oscillation between psychic forms and their physical realities, and the way memories turn over as they play back in the mind’s eye.
OK Pedersen (b. 1993 Chicago) has an MFA in Photography from Concordia University. She is the 2022-23 recipient of Dazibao’s Jeune tête d’affiche prize, and her film Cloud Gate 2 was an official selection at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal in 2022.
