- City
- Toronto
- Booth
- Nathan Phillips Square
Booth 329
Bahram Rameh
Bahram Rameh (born 1990, Iran) is a Toronto-based
multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, and actor. With academic backgrounds in both Graphic Design and Acting, he has worked for over two decades across visual arts, theatre, filmmaking, and visual communication. His practice, ranging from conceptual photography and performance to short film, explores themes of memory, vulnerability, silence, and the blurred boundaries between reality and representation. With an interdisciplinary approach, he uses form, space, and the body as tools to express inner psychological landscapes and human fragility.
“Insomnia” began with a crash, a real one, violent enough to split my life in two: before and after. I lost a close friend in the accident and fell into a coma. When I came back, neither the world was the same , nor was I.
Sleep became unfamiliar to me , not just physically, but on a deeper level. My mind no longer knew how or when to shut down. Memories echoed like subcutaneous noise, devouring the nights. I lived through depression. Through silence. Through erosion. Twice, I chose not to continue. But I stayed. And in the heart of that darkness, something began: creating.
For me, Insomnia is a form of survival , an attempt to give shape to grief, fatigue, and loss. To create, rather than disappear.
After the coma, I developed severe insomnia. One night, when I finally managed to sleep, I dreamt of a girl asleep on top of a traffic light, at a quiet intersection glowing red. That image stayed with me, and became the beginning of this series.
This body of work is built from fragments of that private war: documentary-like scenes captured in public, urban, industrial, restless spaces, where a tired body, a reflection of my own, is caught sleeping: next to a gas pump, beside a cutting machine, on a subway floor.
There is no artificial lighting. No staging. These images were captured as they were unretouched, uncontrolled. The performer surrenders his body to chaos; and it is this surrender that opens a point of entry for the viewer.
The performer is a mirror of myself. But I, too, am in the frame , not physically, but through the lens. This is me watching myself from the outside. The camera is not a passive observer; it is my co-conspirator in a waking dream.
In those years when sleep had abandoned me, Sohrab too remained awake, sharing the grief of losing our mutual friend, Masoud. Perhaps without realizing it, we began carrying our sleeplessness into the city: at night, at dawn, in moments when time itself seemed suspended. It felt, at times, as if we were still standing in the instant of loss.
And Negin… Negin was there through every sleepless year, calm, constant, brave. A presence that held me together through the dreams we built and the awakenings we endured.
This series is dedicated to Masoud, who is no longer with us , and to
Negin Moghaddardoust and Sohrab Moradi Haghighi, who stayed with me through insomnia.
