Shirana Shahbazi

Shirana Shahbazi is an Iranian-born photographer who now lives in Switzerland. Her work includes installations and large prints of conceptual photography.

Born in Tehran, Shahbazi moved to Germany in 1985, studying photography and design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund from 1995 to 1997. From 1997 to 2000, Shahbazi attended the Zurich University of the Arts, in Switzerland, specializing in photography. She currently lives and works in Zurich. Her first successful sequence Goftare Nik/Good Words of color photographs taken in Iran (published as a book in 2001 with Hatje Cantz) led to the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 2002. In 2002, she presented a series of images of Switzerland titled The Garden. At the Venice Biennale in 2003, she presented The Annunciation, an enormous installation in the central pavilion with murals by Iranian painters based on her photographs and a ceiling of lilies. She is the recipient of 2019 Prix Meret Oppenheim.

Presented as an installation, her Meanwhile series (2007), combines everyday images of landscapes, portraits and still lifes from her world travels, one of her images expanded to poster size by an Iranian billboard artist. Other photographs are reproduced as paintings or even carpets. The exhibition Then Again (2012) at the Fotomuseum Winterthur presents 18 large-format works demonstrating how a photograph can be transformed from a depiction of reality into a geometric abstraction. As discussed by Adam Jasper's review in Artforum, Shahbazi's photographs are true abstractions in that they are less a representational photograph than they are actual objects themselves, highly constructed. Continuing to work in analog photographic methods, some of Shabazi's newest works exist as geometric shapes captured on polished mirrors with thin films of color.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024