With my iPhone and laptop in hand, I tuned into Javaad Alipoor’s multimedia piece; Rich Kids: A History of  Shopping Malls in Tehran (2019), unexcited to engage with art through social media. Alipoor’s performance was part of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, which seems only fitting after being a part of the journey set up by Alipoor.  

Using faces altered by Instagram filters, Alipoor and his collaborator Peyvand Sadeghian transported my bed into the audience of a theater production. They recounted the story of Hossein and Parivash, two kids from opposite social and financial classes who were killed by the westernized temptation of wealth and greed. Through their intersecting narratives, Hossein and Parivash demonstrate the ways Middle Eastern youth have exploited their parent’s nobility for the ’gram.

The couple’s story revealed the ever-widening separation of class and the reality of the world’s ultimate environmental decline. They paint the terrifying picture of a world abandoned by the human race, with only the image of fossilized chicken bones nestled into the earth’s crust. Greed and gluttony will be the only evidence left behind by our species. It has been weeks since I watched Alpoor’s piece, and I still cannot look at prepackaged rotisserie chickens the same. Alipoor’s haunting chickens, along with many more statistics, were chanted in unison as fluorescent honey engulfed my screen. Deer ran across my vision in a fiery blaze. Alipoor and Peyvand use rainbow and hazy filters on their social media posts to take the audience back to the very second Hossein and Parivash’s car skips the curb, inevitably colliding with a tree. Every rainbow-enhanced Instagram post is a landmark on Hossein and Parivash’s story as well as a reflection on our greed-driven society. Using Instagram livestream and posts, Allipoor communicates and documents time for his audience in a new way.

Within the hour-long performance, I was transported into the future, taken back in time, and forced to watch in horror of what we've become. Alipoor’s piece changed the way I see an Instagram post and the social media-fueled world we live in today.