Showcasing a New Generation of Iranian Artists
Nemazee Fine Art and Roya Khadjavi Projects just completed a hugely successful exhibition at this year's Photo London.
Bringing together the works of six Iranian photographers whose practice focuses on observation, memory, gender, social and cultural trauma, crisis and oblivion.
We would like to thank all of those who were able to join us.
2024
Featured Artists
ALI TAHAYORI
Born in Shiraz, Iran, Ail Tahayori currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Raised in the oppressively homophobic climate of 1980s Iran, Tahayori assumed the identity of an outsider, further compounded by his migration to Australia in 2007. He holds a Doctorate in Medicine and MFA in Photo media from Sydney's National Art School. Tahayori's interdisciplinary practice ranges from conceptual photography to the moving image and installation.
Tahayori uses archival materials, narrative fragments and performative modalities to explore themes of identity, home and belonging. He has participated in multiple solo and group exhibitions in Australia, the Middle East and Europe. His work has been exhibited at Sharjah Art Foundation (November 2022) Photo London (May 2023) SPRING1883 Melbourne (August 2023) and Unseen Amsterdam Photography Fair (September 2023).
He has been a finalist and winner of several local and international art prizes, including the Prix Yves Hernot Award, Smith and Singer People's Choice Award for Bowness Photography Prize, highly commended award for Gosford Art Prize and finalist in Vantage Point Sharjah, Waverley, Hornsby, Blacktown and Hazelhurst Art on Paper awards. His work has been featured and writen about in Guardian Australia (Sept 2021), Art Review (April 2023), the 100th edition of Photo London Magazine (May 2023), Art Collector Magazine (July 2023), and Sydney Morning Herald (November 2022).
SUSSAN DEYHIM
Sussan Deyhim is an Iranian American composer, vocalist, and performance artist. She is internationally known for creating a unique sonic and vocal language imbued with a sense of ritual and the unknown. Her music reverberates with the spirit of her ancient heritage while spearheading innovation and experimentation. She has performed her music at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Recital Hall, Royal Albert Hall, The Old Vic, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and The Met and The Broad Museums.
Her career spans over four decades since the early age of thirteen and has seen her through Maurice Bejart's Balet of the 20th Century ni Brussels, ascholarship ot Maurice Bejart's performance art school Mudra, and her move to New York where she developed her unique language encompassing music, theatre, dance, media, and film.
Deyhim's wide-ranging collaborations with leading artists from across the spectrum of contemporary art have included, Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Peter Gabriel, U2, Eve Ensler, Shirin Neshat, Richard Horowitz, Micky Hart, Jery Garcia, Joe Jackson, Rufus Wainwright, and The Blue Men Group. Deyhim's vocals can be heard on the soundtracks of Argo (Alexandre Desplat), Last Temptation of Christ (Peter Gabriel), Any Given Sunday (Richard Horowitz), The Stoning of Soraya M(John Debney), The Kite Runner (Alberto Iglesias) and Unfaithful (Jan Kazmarek), among others. Her composition "Windfall/Beshno Az Nev" was included in U2's "360 Tour:" Her acclaimed stage production The House is Black Media Stage Project inspired by Forough Farrokhzad's works and life, was presented at Royce Hall, The Walis and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023.
In 2022, she collaborated with German opera composer Torsten Rasch, performing a run of his new opera The Other Woman at the Semperopera in Dresden Germany. They also collaborated on a full album of new compositions commissioned by Vila Massimo, the German Academy in Rome.
TOORAJ
KHAMENEHZADEH
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Tooraj Khamenhezadeh is an artist based in New York. He began his artistic practice in theatre before shifting to photography and video art. Today, photography, image-based projects, and sometimes the utilisation of his theatre background inform the basis of his works. Born and raised in a region where Eastern philosophy prevails drew him toward an interest in mysticism and poetry. Like Tarighat for a mystic - a mystic's spiritual pilgrimage - he uses art as means of exploring, using intuition as a guide, and achieving a subjective experience. His works are the results of his insights along this path, through which he tries to share layers of various realities with his audience, building on the historical sensibilities of the past and the lived experiences of the present.
His work mixes the personal with the socio political - raising questions about death, solitude, fear, distress, time, the reason for existence, metamorphosis, crisis, and oblivion - and experiments with various image-based techniques and displays, staging scenarios and using dramatic elements ot create an imaginative blend in acombination that si part theatrical, part experimental and part documentary.
Khamenehzadeh's works have been presented in various international festivals, exhibitions, and biennials such as Iran Photo Biennial (Iran), Monnaie de Paris (France), Polyforme Video Art Festival (France), Chongqing Photo and Video Biennale (China), International Art Festival (Nepal) and Now& After Video Art Festival (Russia). His works have also been published different books and magazines like African Textile Today (UK), PIX (India), Connaissance des Arts (France), and Canvas (UAE). He has also participated ni several international artists' workshops and artist residencies, including Theertha (Sri Lanka), Khoj (India), SaNsA (Ghana), Vasl (Pakistan), and Organhus (China). He received his MA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
In addition to his activities as an artist, Khamenehzadeh has been on the curatorial and management teams of many arts and
cultural projects, including arts exchange programs, artist residencies, exhibitions, and international workshops.
NEGIN MAHZOUN
Negin Mahzoun is an artist based in New York. Her practice focuses on observation, memory, and gender. She explores these issues through her personal experiences and cultural identity. Negin looks at the woman's body as an object and subject with the perspective of self-portrait and layers of history and literature.
She uses images in miniature paintings as a reference for self-portraits. In addition, she expresses her work through sculptures, installations, paintings, prints, photography, and textile. In her current practice, she uses sewing, which connects her to her family's professional heritage.
Textile has been historically used as a surreptitious tool to depict trauma and transmit intimate emotional and psychological visual narratives. Investigating the consequences of social-cultural trauma and its injurious impact on the body and psyche has been a central core of Negin's practice. Stitching and sewing for Negin are the essential elements to bond her sentiments and materials to convey remembrance through the hands, craft, and textiles.
She starts with a self-portrait on the fabric and proceeds to stitch repeatedly until the image fades. The repetitive act of damaging the self-portrait with a needle and simultaneously covering it is a metaphor for self- destruction often associated with those suffering from trauma. Negin uses textile as a medium of communicating trauma, with a fresh approach, to visualize the story of oppression and share the trauma as a novel treatment.
DARIUSH NEHDARAN
Dariush Nehdaran born in Isfahan /Iran in 1984 and is a contemporary visual artist who fearlessly defies the rules in order to bring multiple and complex meanings to his work. Through rhythmic juxtaposed images containing a variety of perspectives, he constructs a world between dream and reality and plays with clarity and depth to suggest an alternative way of seeing things. Throughout his childhood, Dariush suffered from poor eyesight, but chose not to wear glasses to avoid the stigma of getting bullied. During that time, he experienced and viewed the world in a blurry and ambiguous way. When he became a teenager, the use of his grandfather's camera enabled him to see the world clearly for the first time in his life. The fact that he saw the world blurry though his own eyes and clear through the lens of the camera and the printed images has driven him to explore the subject of amphibology as the main topic in his work. By doing so, he has created a unique style that demands his viewers' attention and focus as part of the resolution in his work.
Nehdaran currently lives in San Francisco but has expanded his art internationally. His photographs and video works are available both in public and private collections worldwide including the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum (DIA) in the US 2023, the Armando Reverón Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas-Venezuela 2018, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the US 2016, and the Salsali Private Museum in Dubai-UAE 2012.
Dariush is the recipient of multiple awards including the Nikon International Photo Contest in Japan 2015, the Hamghadam Photo Festival ni France 2010, and the 7th Image of the Year Festival in Tehran 2010.
TAHMINEH
MONZAVI
Tahmineh Monzavi, born in 1988 in Tehran, is a socially conscious photographer. She began her professional career as a documentary photographer in 2005. In her professional life, with collection of photographs and her harmonious approach to her environment and her time, Tahmineh created her own style to capture and explore in the fields of Artistic and Documentary photography, with honesty and fearlessness.
In 2007, Tahmineh Monzavi professionally started to take photographs of street scenes in Iran which had more significance to her than what was taught to her at the university. She wanted to become a photographer focusing on social issues. The limited opportunities for female photographers in Iran concerned her deeply and pushed her in her own direction to work as an independent documentary photographer.
Between 2019 and 2022, she focused her work on the roles and cultures of women in urban and rural areas especialy life in coastal provinces of the Persian Gulf including Sistan, Baluchistan and the Hormoz island. During this time, she was able ot create 3 series. "A life in front of you", is a documentation about Lake Hamoun and the scarcity of water which challenges the local population who have not already fled the area. Afro-Iranians Baluchistan, focuses on various aspects of women's lives and their social roles and engagements in the culture despite their isolation. The African Iranians known as zings have settled, and assumed the language, accent, and religion of the region this day.
Her third project, "The Lut" is a documentation of the Lut desert, one of the hottest places on earth, a tract of sand and fantastical rock formations ni southeastern Iran. This desert reminds of the shape of a woman's body and the body of the earth.
"The brides of Mokhber al-Dowleh" series was the first project she worked on under Jalali's supervision. The three years working on this project not only shaped her practice, but also became her most influential body of work. The brides of Mokhber al-Dowleh, began with one single shot that she took on a bridge connecting an intersection. A bridge that no longer exists. The image captures a hundred-year-old building in whose windows, headless mannequins wearing bridal dresses are displayed.
Nemazee Fine Art was founded on a passion and family history with Iranian art.
The gallery ethos is to promote great and innovative Iranian artists and to nurture the best from the emerging new generation, showcasing the extraordinary artistic heritage of Iran and bringing inspiration and understanding of its culture.
Gallery Director, Homayoun Nemazee is a prominent art collector, with a collection comprising of exquisite Persian artefacts, impressionist paintings and antique carpets.
The artists he represents provide a fascinating insight into the modern culture of the region, with works displaying exceptional talent, exhibiting subtle influences and interpretation of its ancient artistic traditions to the international art world.
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