Iranian artist brings personal memories back to life

CAIRO – 8 February 2018: Setareh Shahbazi is an Iranian digital artist whose art is based on blending old family photographs and blending them with numerous and diverse surroundings. She presents these visuals by merging them into her conceptual installations, multi-colored prints, and digitally manipulated photomontages, according to GYPSUM.

Shahbazi composes her artistic work as she is inspired by her personal stories and the forgotten items that have been recently rediscovered .Shahbazi’s works have been exhibited in Iran, Lebanon, Germany, Italy and France.

As for her most recent project, it presents a series of photomontages that are based on hundreds of roughly scanned family photographs. Highlighting her family’s life experience at the time of the Iranian revolution, Shahbazi investigates the loaded history of her family’s deportation at that time. Like the rest of her work, which is built on the logic of free association, these images portray her interests, life story, thoughts and inspirations.

Relying on digital manipulation, she breaks down images into separate visual components and flawlessly rearranges them, producing a whole new product that sometimes surprises the artist herself.

Shahbazi believes that featuring ancient, classical and modernist structures such as birds and family members activate our imagination, according to her interview with Dubai Art.

In addition to Shahbazi’s diverse international collaborations, her solo exhibitions were held at Hamburg and Montgomery, Berlin (2006); Contemporary Arts Forum, St. Barbara (2008) and 98weeks Project Space and Beirut (2010), amongst others. She has also released a book, “Spectral Days” (2011).