November 09, 2018

BBC.com

عکس و نقاشی زنان ایرانی در آمریکا: مد، سکسوالیته و تهران دیجیتالی

پانته آ بهرامیروزنامه نگار

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سیمای پرندگان نام نمایشگاهی است که با آثار ۱۹ هنرمند از ۹ کشور در خاورمیانه و شمال آفریقا هم اکنون در موزه هنری نیوپورت در آمریکا براگزار می شود. از ۱۹ هنرمند شرکت کننده ۹ نفر آنها ایرانی یا ایرانی - آمریکایی هستند.

فرانسین وایس طراح نمایشگاه معتقد است، هر چند نگارخانه ها و نمایشگاه های زیادی در آمریکا به آثار هنر اسلامی یا هنر در دنیای عرب و ایران پرداخته اند، امااین نمایشگاه در ابتدا پاسخی به حوادث ۱۱ سپتامبر و سپس بهار عربی بوده است. او ادامه می دهد: "اگرچه تمرکز نمایشگاه بر روی یک منطقه است، اما به این مفهوم نیست که هنرمندان شرکت کننده دارای هویت یا تجربیات یکسانی هستند، بلکه تمرکز آثار بر روی تکامل هنری در پیش زمینه تاریخی، فرهنگی و جغرافیایی است و به ویژه آنکه نظری هم بر هویت فرهنگی، مرزها و مهاجرت که موضوعی روزآمد هست نیز دارد."

سمیرا علی خانزاده، گوهر دشتی، مینو امامی، شادی قدیریان، پوران خنجی، ارغوان خسروی، آزیتا مرادخانی، سمن سجاسی و هایده شفیعی هنرمندان ایرانی این نمایشگاه هستند. دیگر هنرمندان از کشورهای عراق، لبنان، کویت، فلسطین، عربستان، سوریه و جمهوری آذربایجان هستند.

October 25, 2018

n meeting and greeting the new Fine Arts Work Center fellows, both visual artists and writers who have arrived in October for their winter term from all over the U.S. and the world, something very down-to-earth becomes immediately apparent: How difficult it has become to live and work full-time as an artist. The opportunity afforded to the 20 fellows that’s most precious to them is a chance to devote themselves entirely to the work they love. No matter how welcoming the town is, and how beautiful a place it is, for most of them that economic reality transcends all other concerns.

September 15, 2018

Over the past few decades, the Middle East and North Africa have experienced immense political, ideological, and sociological changes. In 2010, the world watched as the Tunisian Revolution became the “Arab Spring.” With the use of social media, activists and protestors organized protests, resisted their governments, and made the world aware of crimes against humanity. In the art world, recent years have brought an unprecedented number of exhibitions devoted to Islamic art and art of the “Arab World and Iran” or the “Middle East.” Museum initiatives, collectors, foundations, and art fairs have also led to new patronage and audiences for Middle Eastern art and have stimulated the increased international interest in art of the Middle East and North Africa.

Borrowing its title from a line in the poem “A Lesson in Drawing” by Syrian writer  Nizar Qabbani, “The Shapes of Birds” showcases the work of contemporary artists from, or with roots in, the Middle East and North Africa. Working in a wide array of media—sculpture, installation, video, photography, painting, and illustration—the artists in this show both embrace older artistic traditions while exploring new media, ideas, and technologies.

August 04, 2018

RISD MFA PAINTING CLASS OF 2018

curated by Sara Reisman 

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Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to announce its late summer exhibition Counter Narratives: Geographies of the Unfamiliar featuring ten recent graduates of Rhode Island School of Design’s MFA Program in Painting. With a diversity of aesthetics and approaches to painting as a practice, the artists in the exhibition represent a unique range of possibilities afforded by painting. A number of artists in the exhibition use photography as a starting point – referencing family photos, images of quotidian objects and interiors – in order to document origin stories, political struggle, and personal journeys that have led to unexpected places and experiences. Some of the artworks in the exhibition exploit photography to surrealistic ends, rendering unknown landscapes to make sense of the broader world. Hailing from Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Palestine, Mexico, and the United States, the artists whose works are featured in Counter Narratives weave together contrasting stories, reflecting on the potentials of mark making as a form of communication and connectivity.

Incorporating realism and fantastic visuals, Arghavan Khosravi, Sanié Shoaib Bokhari, and Marisa Adesman represent feminine perspectives that collectively offer worldly and domestic vantage points, from interior spaces – from under the dining room table, to postmodern architectural compositions that reinterpret the conventional structure of the canvas. Christian Berman and Rebecca Levitan work with familiar objects and aesthetics – a telephone, costume jewelry, textiles, pixelation – to render them unfamiliar yet dreamlike, creating a sense of deja vu.

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August 04, 2018

Fridman gallery presents Strange Beach, an exhibition featuring the work of Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust.  Each artist uses the human figure to highlight tensions and vulnerabilities symptomatic of our times.

Strange Beach is a metaphor for the body—as a surface that exhibits and retains memories and social biases, as a unique algorithm that constructs behaviors on behalf of the self. Claudia Rankine, in her Citizen: An American Lyric, described the body as “the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through…” 

July 18, 2018

Summertime is a time for going to the beach, but that’s not what this group exhibition at Fridman Gallery is about, despite the name. Rather, it’s a “metaphor for the body,” framing one’s physical form as a vessel of sorts that can advance, retreat, swallow up others, be intruded upon, amass debris and valuable items alike over time. Three artists comprise Strange Beach: Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust, who incorporate themes of race, social history, portraiture, and the marginalized retaking their own narratives, whether this be through drawing on photographs to create something celestial or painting portraits of people using their own skin tones to inform the color palette.

July 24, 2018

3. “Strange Beach” at Fridman Gallery

A group exhibition at Fridman’s Spring Street gallery includes the artists Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust—each of the artists address the human figure, sometimes as a metaphor, sometimes as a literal vessel that bears the marks of life experience. All three artists will be present for the opening reception.

July 23, 2018

Opening: “Strange Beach” at Fridman Gallery
“Strange Beach,” which brings together work by Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust, considers different ways to consider the human body. Figurative works abound, though each artist’s approach to the style is quite different. Lewis’s works on paper often center on social histories; Khosravi’s paintings, influenced by Persian miniature and Surrealism, grapple with notions of citizenship; and Rust’s portraits address perceptions of race.
Fridman Gallery, 287 Spring Street, 6 p

July 18, 2018

Fridman Gallery is pleased to present Strange Beach, an exhibition featuring the work of Arghavan Khosravi, Nate Lewis, and Tajh Rust. Each artist uses the human figure to highlight tensions and vulnerabilities symptomatic of our times. ​ Strange Beach is a metaphor for the body—as a surface that exhibits and retains memories and social biases, as a unique algorithm that constructs behaviors on behalf of the self. Claudia Rankine, in her Citizen: An American Lyric, described the body as “the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through…” ​ The body hosting the unseen narrative of an individual is the primary focus of Nate Lewis’ works on paper. By cutting, folding and drawing in ink upon photographed figures, he evokes empathy in dealing with issues of race and social history. Lewis, a former critical care nurse, began making art with a scalpel on EKG paper. He treats the material like an organism, exploring what lesions exist within and without us.

Subliminal social histories also underline the work of Arghavan Khosravi. The artist paints motifs influenced by Persian miniature and Surrealism on scanned pages of her Iranian passport and banknotes. Set atop whimsical spaces, the tromp l’oeil figures reach beyond the surface, beyond travel bans and nationalistic politics of citizenship. The female body, front and center, takes charge of historical narratives.

January 04, 2018

 Juror: Jen Mergel

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Two emerging visual artists living and working in New England have been chosen as 2018 Walter Feldman Fellows: Arghavan Khosravi and Katherine Mitchell DiRico. Both bring highly distinctive approaches to the practice of contemporary art and are connected to leading art schools in the region, RISD and Montserrat respectively.

Khosravi and DiRico will work with a professional coach to define and achieve goals for their artistic practice in 2018.

The 2018 Feldman Fellowship Juror, Jen Mergel, had this to say about the Fellows:

Arghavan Khosravi has shown a vision, commitment, ambition, and talent that seems primed for support of a Feldman Fellowship. Her mastery of materials, imagery, and narratives could be well honed through the program to engage in a national art discourse.

Katherine Mitchell DiRico has grown a practice across drawing, installation, video and photography that focuses on a timely theme: how interconnection is always more complex than comprehension. The connections between her own distinct bodies of work could be smartly explored through a Feldman Fellowship.

August 03, 2017

​Marisa Adesman, Christian Berman, Sanie Bokhari, Ada Goldfeld, Molly Kaderka, Arghavan Khosravi, Rebecca Levitan, Saif Mhaisen, Gina Palacios, Ohad Sarfaty

Curated by Hrag Vartanian

Home has emerged as a powerful symbol during our present period of uncertainty. It’s a universal yet nebulous ideal that can migrate and adapt with us across continents. I couldn’t help but think about that unique but enigmatic sense of belonging that’s at the core of human relationships while looking at the work by these young artists, all of whom have infused their work with a notion of home.

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In Arghavan Khosravi’s dream-like images, she illuminates a world where most people have limited mobility across national boundaries. Weaving this contemporary reality with the language of graphic novels and manuscript illumination, she suggests a lineage of migration that presents a shifting space where the public and private are interlocked and indivisible.

June 15, 2017

This year, five prolific young artists were chosen from over 150 submissions. The selections were made by Jeffrey De Blois of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Rachel Moore, executive director at the Helen Day; and Ian Alden Russell, curator at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.

Here’s a look at the five artists.

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• Arghavan Khosravi probes both personal and political experiences by integrating Persian motifs from her native Iran with imagery taken from contemporary media and popular culture that result in vibrant works on paper. Khosravi, trained as a graphic designer, is a second-year student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

July 05, 2017

Arghavan Khosravi, a native of Tehran, Iran, explores aspects of identity and political experience in a series of works on paper. Among the works on exhibition are four meticulously adorned wooden boxes that each encase an authentic Iranian passport intricately elaborated with imagery reminiscent of Persian miniatures. Upon closer look, a viewer- constructed narrative emerges from the juxtapositions of disparate traditional and contemporary figures and objects — for example, a group of veiled women, a gun, a soldier’s camouflaged legs, a peering eye from an opening in a mihrab. Four large paintings continue the passport theme, inviting the viewer to reflect on the president’s Muslim travel ban. The artist is a second-year student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

April 23, 2017

Iranian graduate student Arghavan Khosravi MFA 18 PT had just returned to Providence from a trip home when President Trump’s executive order blocking Muslim refugees and foreign nationals from entering or re-entering the US went into effect on January 27. Deeply disturbed by the news, she responded by digging out her expired passports and spontaneously turning them into art. “It seems I won’t need my passport anymore,” she declared in an Instagram post, “so I started painting on it.

April 05, 2017

“When I first saw Tala Madani’s paintings in person, it wasn’t only seeing paintings of a successful Iranian woman that excited me, it was the complexity in meaning. The way each painting can be read from different perspectives leads the audience to experience a dissonance in interpreting her work. Her loosely applied brushstrokes portray often cartoonish characters, which may not initially seem to be a sophisticated style to convey such complicated concepts.