BIO
Naghmeh Sharifi is an Iranian / Canadian multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal since 2009. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and one in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. In 2018 Sharifi completed her MFA degree at Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited in Iran, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, United States, Canada and Macedonia. In Montréal, she has presented her work at Conseils des arts de Montréal (2015), Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (2017), the MAI (2018) and the Phi Centre (2020) among many other sites. Sharifi was the recipient of the Impressions Residency grant at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2015 and the Phi Centre's Parallel Lines Residency in 2020. Traditionally trained as a painter, in the recent years Sharifi's choice of medium has expanded in response to her transforming subject matters. Sharifi’s most recent projects are an animated short-film The GraveSleepers and an audio-visual installation entitled Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun).
STATEMENT
My multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculptural installations, animation and digital media. My interests are rooted in a fascination with the body – its psychology, its ability to be a place of memory, and as a shell for one’s presence in the world. I investigate the way bodies contextualize themselves in, against, engulfed, or invaded by spaces they inhabit. Through blurring borders, separating the figure and ground, I highlight at once the fragility and the agency of the body as a manifestation of critical cartography. To explore the hazy and uncertain places my subjects navigate, a tussle between marking and erasure has become my most recent approach to image-making. Whether it is through un-painting; a way of constructing the final imagery through wiping the paint with solvents or erasing and adding one frame to the next, I ultimately questions how we would be read and how we might shape space for ourselves in the world if stripped of all context.