Known / Un Known: Ryat Yezbick’s “Sick Speech” and the Exploration of Performing the Self and Queer Aesthetics in the Life, Work, and Death of Nasim Aghdam

Trigger warning: this text discusses an active shooter and suicide. 

Los Angeles-based artist Ryat Yezbick performed their artwork Sick Speech this past March 8th at myspace in L.A. The artist read a lecture paired with a well-timed text and image-based PowerPoint with an accompanying soundtrack of an intermittent, throbbing drumbeat resembling a collective heartbeat. The work elucidates Yezbick’s interest surrounding the life, work, and death of Nasim Najafi Aghdam. 

Nasim Aghdam troubles our conceptions of the other, the role of women and non-heteronormative systems of understanding. Her status as an immigrant and a seemingly violent, unpredictable woman destabilizes any constructive criticism concerning her motives in the wake of her notoriety as the YouTube Shooter. While it is necessary to outline what we do and do not know about Nasim Aghdam, in Sick Speech, Yezbick flips the narrative of this young woman’s life by highlighting not her position as an extremist or hysterical and uncontrollable woman, but instead as an individual who was censored, who played with the notions of performativity, and who introduced a compelling approach to queer aesthetics that contribute to the current reading of social media in the age of the internet. 

Nasim Aghdam was born in the city of Urmia in Iran on April 5th, 1979, and died in San Bruno, California on April 3rd, 2018, two days before her 39th birthday. She was a social media star. The videos consisted of Nasim touting the benefits of vegan living, working out, and standing up for animal rights. She shared exercise routines and recipes across her four YouTube channels in English, Turkish, Persian, and Farsi. 

However, the narrative that exists post-Nasim’s death centres entirely around how she came to be known: as the YouTube Shooter. On April 3rd, 2018, Nasim broke into YouTube Headquarters in San Bruno, California, where she opened fire, injuring three people before turning the gun on herself. The coroner’s report noted that she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart. The cause of death was officially ruled a suicide. 

Censorship is an ongoing issue that is levelled against women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ2S+ individuals, in particular when it comes to representation across social media platforms. Nasim boasted over 9 million views across her YouTube channels and was wildly popular in her home country of Iran, yet her work was censored. As Yezbick explains, Nasim was one of the thousands of people that were and continue to be affected by what is known as “adpocalypse.”​​¹ In February 2017, YouTube fell under fire from many of their corporate sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson after their ads began popping up next to videos that contained hate speech, white supremacy, abuse, child pornography, and suicidal content. In an effort to ensure the continuing financial support from these corporations, YouTube created an algorithm to assist in catching the videos with what was deemed unacceptable content in order to block them. The algorithm also filtered out content that was either unrelated or peripherally related, including videos about suicide prevention. Through its faulty application, it targeted work by vloggers who fell into the category of foreign or other. This was a move made by the video-sharing website in an effort to rebrand themselves as “family-friendly”—coded language, as Yezbick notes, which is also used to oppress those who do not conform to societal norms. Nasim fell into this latter category, being a woman of colour, an immigrant, and a non-feminine-presenting woman. These regulations filtered out the videos Nasim was creating, the aesthetic of which has been described as “colourful” by the New York Times, and “bizarre” on CNN, yet not violent or abusive. This censorship of Nasim’s work on the part of YouTube created a bias favouring heteronormative white representation, thus creating a space that is racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.

It was this censorship that was the breaking point for Nasim. 

Yezbick opened Sick Speech, what they call a lecture-performance, in a curious way. Centred within the white screen of the projection reads a sign written in messy, red, uppercase letters: This is not a performance. The artist began their talk stating, “This is a lecture about Nasim Aghdam. …” continuing, “It is also a lecture about myself…” It is vital for Yezbick to clearly identify their motives and interests as a queer feminist artist. As they state, the main focuses of their practice are capitalism, money, our understanding of the meaning of “the social” and the performance of everyday life. In particular, they point out how their exploration of performance can be used as a tool for being seen and heard.

Despite Yezbick’s opening visual statement, the audience is aware that this work is a performance. Hidden within the framework of Sick Speech is a doubling of the meaning and manifestation of performing the self. Yezbick plays with the notion of performativity throughout the piece, while repeatedly stating “This is not a performance.” 

In her videos, Nasim was also performing a version of the self. Here, the mainstream media and others’ understanding of who Nasim was and what her message embodied is complicated by her performance of the self. Yezbick clearly illustrates how Nasim was othered through the understanding and reception of her work as well as how she presented herself within the social realm, none of which was acceptable in American media. The Nasim that the world came to know first through her videos on YouTube and then following the YouTube shooting is not the same individual, or even true representations of who Nasim Aghdam was. Her true identity became conflated and misinterpreted with her performance of the self in her videos and the popular interpretation of such a figure in mass media: the mad and hysterical woman who was driven to violence and suicide. The paradigm created between these performance polarities provides an opportunity to critique how the internet has affected our understanding of humanity. A cognitive dissonance is underlined through Yezbick’s piece. Embedded throughout Sick Speech is the artist’s reinterpretation of what it means to perform the self in the age of social media.

Nasim’s channels are now removed, her Twitter and Instagram virtually non-existent, and her website blocked; the most popular videos that come up in a search of Nasim are news clips discussing every detail of the shooting, as well as outsiders, ie. those who did not know Nasim, offering their own interpretations of her and her actions. In all of these accounts, there exists a strong sense of cognitive dissonance in which Nasim is expected to fit into a heteronormative patriarchal understanding, one which inevitably disallows and invalidates a feminist reading of her work and life.

Yezbick inverts how we understand Nasim in order to honour a feminist reading. As one site of departure, the artist cites the notion of the “feminist snap,” as theorized by Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life. Ahmed describes the feminist snap as “… breaking points,…” that are reached “…when what you come up against threatens to be too much, threatens a life, or a dream, or a hope.”​​² Most importantly, as Yezbick also cites, the feminist snap is that moment when women, individually or collectively, suddenly snap back at societal oppression. The oppression that Nasim experienced was compounded by her otherness online and offline. Being an immigrant, a woman, and a person of colour all worked against her in assimilating into American culture. She did not fit the status quo. She looked different, acted different, presented different; different is other, and other is not acceptable. 

One of the most salient points Yezbick makes in their piece is their observation and thesis that, “… regardless of sexual orientation, […] Nasim was queer, that her work embodies a queer position. And that her queerness marked a series of confused perceptions about her and her actions, each concluding in the interpreted failure and non-remarkable quality of Nasim as a person, despite popular fascination and curiosity about her videos and performances.” Being queer or creating work that speaks to a queer aesthetic problematizes the very structure within which Nasim’s work and self were understood. In order to regain her voice and presence, Nasim took drastic action. But in her final act, when she fired a bullet through her heart, she inadvertently obliterated herself completely. Her legacy has been misinterpreted, misunderstood, and overshadowed by her violent action, her snap. Still, in reframing her positioning from a queer perspective, Yezbick is successful in reorienting the viewer’s perception of Nasim. Yezbick forces us to take notice and to re-evaluate the position Nasim was coming from. 

In a recent talk at the University of Calgary, Indigenous writer Lee Maracle stated, “It is powerful to be noticed.”​​³ Nasim was noticed for a time and then was blocked from being seen or heard. Oppressed. She was no longer being noticed; she no longer held power. Were her actions a misguided way of regaining it? Her power was removed when she was censored, and not only the power of her performance online but inherent in her performance of herself. Queering her aesthetic reinstates this power. 

In Sick Speech, Yezbick takes a critical stance, distancing their discussion from the sensationalism surrounding Nasim and her actions. The artist instead refocuses their attention on why Nasim presents as such a problematic individual for American culture to accept. They retell Nasim’s story in order to highlight the failings of a culture focused on fear of the unknown, one associated with otherness. In so doing, the artist uncovers more constructive ways of understanding who Nasim was. Yezbick provides a space for a profound and human reading, one guided by criticality as much as care. In this interpretation an alternative framework for discussing Nasim is offered, one that moves away from vilification, racism, and sexism. Through their focus initially on the censorship of Nasim’s work, how performativity informs their understanding of Nasim, and finally, their theory of a queer aesthetic in Nasim’s work, Yezbick sets up a new forum for constructively analyzing Nasim Aghdam. They thus offer a renegotiation of terms, providing an alternative ending for the life of Nasim.

Maeve Hanna is a writer based in Treaty 7 Territory (Calgary, AB). She is akimbo.ca‘s Calgary Correspondent and has previously written for Border Crossing, C Magazine, Canadian Art, esse arts + opinions, Frieze, Galleries West, Los Angeles Review of Books and Sculpture Magazine.  

Images:
Ryat Yezbick, Sick Speech, 2019. Performance, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Alberta and myspace, Los Angeles California. Images courtesy of the artist.

1. “Adpocalypse” is an internet slang term used to refer to the removal of advertisements and revenue from content creators that became a form of censorship.
2. Sara Ahmed. Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 626. Apple Books.
3. An Evening with Lee Maracle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Gwen Benaway, Calgary Distinguished Writers Program. February 28, 2020, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.

This article is published in issue 37.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue