The first comprehensive monograph of the art and life of Iranian American artist of Armenian descent Sonia Balassanian: in this deeply personal portrait, author Dr. Omar Kholeif weaves together poetry, memoir, and historical anecdote to trace the contours of Balassanian's world.
Imagine/otherwise presents critical biographies of underrepresented
queer, non-binary, or
female-identifying artists. Edited by
Omar Kholeif, the series emphasizes the concept of "female worlding" with books that serve as field guides into previously unexplored, overlooked, or inaccessible artistic lives. The overall proposition of the series (to "imagine" a world "otherwise") stems from the desire to find a different way of writing and reading about art. Can art be examined unreservedly, unburdened of the limits imposed by the dominant hand of hegemony?
Current editorial advisors for the series include
Skye Arundhati Thomas, Zoe Butt, Carla Chammas, Alison Hearst, and Sarah Perks.
Omar Kholeif (born in Cairo, lives and works in Chicago and London) is a writer, curator, editor, and broadcaster. He has written extensively on art in a global context, focusing on art that intersects with the Internet, as well as works of art from emerging geographic territories that have yet to be seen in the mainstream. He is the author and or editor of over two-dozen books and his writing has appeared in
The Guardian,
Wired,
frieze, and
Artforum,
Mousse, among numerous publications. Media organs such as,
The New York Times, BBC,
Financial Times,
The Wall Street Journal,
GQ,
The Economist,
The Art Newspaper,
Vice,
The New Scientist, and others, have profiled his work.
Sonia Balassanian (born 1942 in Arak, lives and works between New York and Armenia) is an Iranian American artist of Armenian descent.
With a career spanning more than five decades, Balassanian is known for her multidisciplinary, politically charged practice that spans painting, poetry, photography, video, installation, performance, and drawing. At the heart of her corpus are colorful, large-scale, lyrically abstract paintings that she began in the 1960s. In the 1980s, after she had moved to New York, her work took a political turn following the Iranian Revolution. Balassanian drew newfound attention for Hostages: A Diary (1980), an installation of drawings that mapped the experience of following the Iran hostage crisis from the United States, and for Cauterized Literature (1987), a mixed-media series of burnt books mounted on canvas that comments on censorship in Iran.
