Sayeh Sarfaraz

Sayeh Sarfaraz was born in Shiraz, the cultural capital of Iran. She graduated from HEAR Strasbourg, France. 

Sayeh Sarfaraz brings to light the tensions between recent history and its possible visual narratives. She creates a personal inventory of protesters, figureheads, and fragments of events drawn from the recent popular uprisings in the Middle-East and Iran. From these, she constructs an imaginary world that gives the full scope to the political dimensions of the images. Her characters comprise an alluring parade of ghosts, fools, rogues, and anonymous prisoners. Between dispersion and crystallization, this throng gives shape to disturbing scenes, strangely fixed in the apparent imbalance of power. The magic occurs in the irreconcilability of these images that draw the eye towards both drama and play. Highly political motives intermingle with the fable to confound various levels of reading. The customary reference to toys is obscured to give way to expressions of violence in the fragility of these simple forms. Together, these innocent and threatening motifs engender ambiguous images that forge a bond between the symbolic and the real.