BIO

Ghazal Rahimi is an Iranian artist currently based in Los Angeles. Born in Tehran, Iran, in 1994, Rahimi received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Rahimi works in painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation.

Within her interdisciplinary practice, she explores themes of migration, cultural assimilation, and simultaneous realities in oneself. Based on the theoretical position that exposing oneself to a liminal space (in-between the familiar and the unfamiliar and/or the tradition and the revolution), is an aesthetic process, she explores what may change and shift in cultural transitions, what are the challenges one faces when going through migration, and what gets lost in this transition?

Rahimi explores cross-cultural or intercultural issues, and questions the notion of authenticity and being different in relation to oppressing and categorizing one group or oneself. Unearthing the untold and invisible stories, and forgotten legacies, She creates complex visuals and haptic relations to visualize what has been forgotten or marginalized. Rahimi utilizes Islamic geometric patterns and shatters their designs to represent liberation from cultural pressure and geopolitical borders, and more importantly to create a sense of destruction that leads to new growth. By presenting the Islamic and abstract patterns out of their historical function (that was beauty and to show the notion of the divine,) She aims to bring attention to how cultural heritage could be reinvented and used as a corridor to progressive modernity.