naveed L. salek nejad aka Princex Naveed

Being ジャンヌJeanne_Naveed L. Salek Nejad_CR-Kinga

Kinga Michalska

naveed L. salek nejad aka Princex Naveed is an artist, writer and cultural mediator, holding an MA from Concordia University’s Individualized Program. Their artworks have been on display in Canada and internationally, most recently at Former Jewish Orphanage Pankow (Berlin, 2025), the MFA Sub Gallery (Montréal, 2024), the Treaty Space Gallery (Halifax, 2023), and at Heima Collective (Seyðisfjörður, 2023). Their non-fiction writing and poetry has appeared in books published in Germany (Querverlag) and the United States (Thick Press), online (Esse arts + opinions), and in self-published artist books. Born to a Polish mother and Irani father in Germany, they reside in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal.

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Being ジャンヌ Jeanne

Being ジャンヌ Jeanne is a performance-for-the-camera presented as a series of photographic prints. In it, naveed recreates a transformation scene from the anime Kamikaze Kaitō Jeanne, in which a teenage girl turns into the Catholic saint Joan of Arc with the help of a magical rosary and her angelic assistant. Drawn from the artist’s childhood fascination with this scene, the project revisits it through a trans perspective.

Informed by naveed’s lived experience, the work examines the place of Catholicism in Poland: how it has long shaped the nation’s self-image and, through regressive legislation, controlled women’s and queer bodies. For the artist, religion operates less as a belief than as a laborious manual: transmitted, disciplined, and rehearsed until it becomes ingrained. In that logic, being Polish meant being Catholic, and being Catholic meant being a straight man.

Against the backdrop of this inheritance, the project treats transformation as an instruction — one that can be mis_read, interrupted, rewritten, and resisted. By reworking the Catholic symbolism of Kamikaze Kaitō Jeanne and restaging it through a trans body, naveed interrupts these encoded rules and drafts a new manual: one that turns from obediently following rules toward enfranchising authorship.

©Kinga Michalska

©Tobias Brust

CREDITS

Team

Creation and Performance
Princex Naveed