A new series of photographic works by Shirana Shahbazi.
Taken during the artist's three-month stay in India, the photos, often of solitary people in architectonic space or a landscape, have been taken apart and reshaped through a digital collage technique, their color removed or reconfigured. Carefully selected areas of luminous color are layered on top of one another, sometimes protruding far beyond the edges of the actual scene, flowing together with selected openings, or breaking open the composition like a prism. The effect is to dissolve motifs from the journey, fragmenting them from their original narratives. Similar to previous series by Shahbazi such as “Tehran North” (2015), these works explore how the encounters experienced during travel can be perceived photographically without being determined by the visual power and cultural charge of their original colors.
Born in Tehran in 1974, Shirana Shahbazi moved to Germany at the age of 11. She studied photography in Dortmund and Zurich, where she lives and works today. Her practice has been dedicated to generating a hybrid visual language that defies simple categorization and can be experienced on multiple levels. It challenges the translation and the transcultural construction of meaning. The physical presence of her work is just as important as its semantic underpinnings.
Shirana Shahbazi took part in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and has had exhibitions in notable museums including Kunstmuseum, Lucerne (2026); Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2018); Museum Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2017), Camera Austria, Graz (2016), Kunsthalle Bern (2014); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012/2013). She received the 2019 Meret Oppenheim Prize for Visual Arts in Switzerland and the 2022 Mutina Art Prize in Modena, Italy.
She is a member of the artists collective Shahrzad.
