Portfolio
Welcome to my interactive 2026 portfolio.
VIDEO
قاصدک / Qasedak / Dandelion
Dandelion (Qasedak) is an animated audiovisual meditation inspired by the poem of the same name by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales. Qasedak, the Farsi word for dandelion, literally translates to "little messenger." The film follows a woman collecting and releasing fallen dandelion seeds: an act of revival for journeys cut short. Created in the wake of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, the work serves as an homage to voices denied resonance. Through the act of gathering and releasing, Qasedak transforms personal grief into a modular installation bridging the gap between cinema and gallery.
RECENT PAINTINGS
Sefid Chāl
Sefid Chāl / The White Hollow is an ongoing exploration into the space between folklore and autofiction, drawing on Iranian oral traditions, mythology, and imagined psychological landscapes. Human figures, landscapes, and otherworldly presences — jen, div, pari — emerge alongside self-invented characters and dreamlike environments.
The title Sefid Chal, a self-invented term, suggests the inverse of a black hole: not a site of collapse, but a receptive hollow that gathers fragments of stories, images, and inherited worlds, where memory and imagination coexist and meaning accumulates without resolution. Through accumulation, erasure, and reworking, forms appear and recede, leaving traces of what has been altered, imagined, or left unresolved.
AUDIOVISUAL INSTALLATION
Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun)
Fading Fables (Zar-Afshun) is an audiovisual installation exploring memory and erasure through oral storytelling. Sineh-be-sineh is a Farsi expression that translates to "chest to chest." It describes the oral tradition of transmitting stories — with voice and heart as instruments. Drawing on a voice recording of my late grandmother narrating Zar-Afshun, an old Iranian folktale, this work takes the iterative act of drawing, erasing, and re-drawing as its own mode of storytelling. What has traveled sineh-be-sineh across generations is reimagined and retold once more, audiovisually and refracted this time through the absence of female representation within the post-revolutionary Iran I grew up in.
UNPAINTING
Places you can never go
In the two series of paintings: Souvenirs to Nowhere and Là où tu ne pourras jamais aller I have worked exclusively with the pigment prussian blue. each canvas begins fully covered in a monochrome layer of paint. Rather than building up an image, I work in negative, using solvents to dissolve and dilute the pigment and allowing forms to emerge by subtraction, a way of unearthing an image that symbolically lies beneath the surface. The wash of blue recalls the cyanotype, in which a photographic image forms through exposure on light-sensitive paper. As well, blue carries as ''the colour of faraway places'' as Rebecca Solnit writes in A Field Guide to Getting Lost— places you can never go.
DRAWING INSTALLATION
To live as an organ within oneself
In To Live as an Organ within Oneself*, varying sizes of ink drawings from intimate rising to nearly life-size, overflow their own bounds, their figures seeming to draw closer, to better look at the viewer. The bodies depicted are no more than envelopes: symbols of presence, a form and silhouette existing in space. Having learned to read bodies and body language, I observes how individuals hold, position themselves and interact with one another, revealing how context weighs on the psyche and how experiences of domination inscribe themselves on our outer envelope of flesh and bone. The figures retain their complexity without ever being fully resolved. The body here becomes the site of a psyche in motion, and of a geographical journey carried on the self.
Naghmeh Sharifi
Naghmeh Sharifi is an Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. She completed her MFA degree at Concordia University in 2018.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Iran, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, the United States, and Macedonia. In Montreal, she has presented her work at the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, the MAI, and the Phi Centre, with recent solo exhibitions at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (2026).
Sharifi was the recipient of the Impressions Residency at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Phi Centre’s Parallel Lines Residency, and the RBC Maison d'Ariane residency. Formally trained as a painter, her practice has evolved into a complex multidisciplinary inquiry including time-based media and installation.
