NY | Artist-Led Tour of “A Bridge Between You and Everything…” curated by Shirin Neshat

Image: Hadieh Shafie, Turn No 11. Ink, Acrylic and pencil on mat board, 12 inch in diameter, 2019

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Join ArtTable for an evening with the artists of A Bridge Between You and Everything: An Exhibition of Iranian Women Artists presented by the Center for Human Rights in Iran and curated by Shirin Neshat, an internationally renowned, Iranian-born, New York-based artist whose work includes film, video and photography.

A Bridge Between You and Everything features nearly 100 works—paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography and video—by both established and emerging artists, who began working after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. 

“At a time when the Western world is shining a spotlight on women’s issues and equality, it’s vital that we use this moment of the public imagination to empower dialogues from women and immigrant artists who have, and likely still continue to experience forms of repression, both in the extreme and every day,” curator Shirin Neshat said.

“This exhibit showcases the richness of contemporary Iranian art and the ability of these women to communicate vital and universal themes of identity and gender through their artistic vision,” added Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran.

Participating Artists: 

Afruz Amighi is an Iranian-born artist who completed her BA in political science at Barnard College at Columbia University, before going on to complete her MFA at New York University. She was the inaugural recipient of the Jameel Prize for Middle Eastern Contemporary art awarded by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2009. Afruz’s work draws heavily upon Iranian architecture for both its forms and concepts. Working with a wide variety of materials, including textiles and steel, the mainstay of her practice involves the interplay between light and shadow. Through the manipulation of light, she creates imagined sanctuaries for the purpose of both reflection and escape.  In 2011, Afruz was granted a fellowship in sculpture by the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 2013 her work was commissioned for the 55th Venice Biennale. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (New York, NY); the Houston Museum of Fine Art (Houston, TX); the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK); and the Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY), among others. In 2018, she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. Afruz currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Roya Farassat is a painter and sculptor born and raised in Tehran, Iran. She moved to New York prior to the Islamic revolution and received a BFA in painting from the Parsons School of Design. The themes of oppression, solitude and identity animate both her paintings and sculptures, welded on steel. In an earlier body of work from the series, A Mirror Has Two Faces, she paints abstracted and symbolic portraits of women in veil and frames them in ornamental elements as seen in compositions familiar to the history of imperial Persian painting. Roya challenges the cultural expectations of her heritage with humor and investigates the identity of women and their silent resistance, living under the scrutiny of a patriarchal society. These paintings have been reviewed by The New York Times and exhibited widely in the United States including at The Edward Hopper House (Nyack, NY); The Queens Museum (Queens, NY); The Taubman Museum 9Roanoke, VA0; Leila Heller Gallery (New York, NY); The Center for Book Arts (New York, NY); and most recently the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Roya currently lives and works in New York.

Shahrzad Changalvaee is a sculptor and visual artist. Born in Tehran, Iran, she received her BA in Visual Communications from Tehran University and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2015. Working across installation, sculpture, photography, performance and video, her practice responds to time and space, using found images and footages in adjacent to artist-made and primary materials. Through structures that are mostly temporal, fragile and fragmented, she constructs narratives that question local/global, information/anecdote, language/communication and alienism/exoticism. Shahrzad’s work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions in Iran, the UAE, Britain, Canada and the U.S. Notable shows have been held at The Chimney (Brooklyn, NY), Soho20 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and the O Gallery (Tehran, Iran). In 2011 Shahrzad was introduced as the runner-up for the Magic of Persia Award.  She currently is a member and co-director of Bon-Gah Collective in Tehran. Shahrzad lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Nazanin Noroozi works predominantly in the medium of printmaking, but also incorporates painting and alternative photographic processes, exploring new ways to represent the ideas of collective memory, longing and diaspora. She invites the viewer to look into broken narratives through various juxtapositions of personal and family archives, landscapes, found imagery and lo-fi graphics. These works are a riff on the voyeuristic pleasures of looking at strangers’ personal archives and at the same time recalling a sense of ambiguity and fragility that the analogue world of the recent past carried. Nazanin’s work has been widely exhibited in both Iran and the United States, including at the Museum of Russian Art (Jersey City, NJ); Noyes Museum of Art (Atlantic City, NJ); Prizm Art Fair (Miami, FL); and Columbia University (New York, NY). She is the recipient of NYFA IAP Program 2018, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts fellowship, MASS MoCA Studio Residency 2019, and the winner of  “Selection of a New Generation” award in Iran. She is the editor at large of Kaarnamaa, a Journal of Art History and Criticism. Nazanin received her MFA in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute in 2015 and her MA in Art History from Tehran University of Art in 2012.  She currently lives and works in New York City. 

Bahar Sabzevari is an Iranian artist exploring identity through self-portraiture, narrative painting and video art. In her most recent series of self-portraits, she questions Iranians’ tendency and obsession to praise the past. Why do we romanticize Persian history which is so far from the realities of our contemporary life? Integrating Persian motifs, religious details and characters into her self-portraits, Bahar explores the concept of nostalgia and creates illusions of a lost age of glory. Her earlier self-portraits focus on contemporary Iranian society. In the “Bad Girls” series, Bahar explores the paradoxes she has experienced, being a woman caught between the restrictions of the Islamic cultural regime and everyday existence living in modern times. Born in Shahroud, Iran, Bahar received her MFA in painting at the New York Academy of Art in 2018. Notable exhibition venues include FIAC Art Fair (Paris, France); Leila Heller Gallery (New York, NY); Galerie RX (Paris, France); Kamil Art Gallery (Monte Carlo, Monaco); Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France); and a solo show at the Watson Institute, Brown University (Providence, RI). Bahar has been the recipient of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Residency in Beijing, China summer of 2017. She lives and works in New York.

Hadieh Shafie is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. In her works the occulting of text can be traced back to her childhood and adolescence growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, where the influence of books on political and social affairs was highly scrutinized and policed by the newly established government. Books, poetry and music were conversely also a means of mental escape for her from the subsequent years of political turmoil during the Iran-Iraq war. In 1983 she immigrated to the USA. Her work is included in prominent public collections namely the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); The Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK); The Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH); Sheldon Museum of Art (Lincoln, NE); The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art (Winter Park, FL); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Davis Museum (Wellesley, MA); The British Museum (London, UK); and The Brooklyn Museum of Art (Brooklyn, NY). Hadieh holds an MFA in Imaging and Digital Arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 2017, she was nominated for the “Anonymous Was A Woman” Award.

Who’s attending this program? Click here to see who’s currently registered!

Thank you to Lauren Poehl, Director of Development, Center for Human Rights in Iran and Lucy Oakley, Head of Education and Programs, Grey Art Gallery for organizing this program.