A conversation with Shirana Shahbazi

Shirana Shahbazi discusses her diverse and iterative photographic practice in conjunction with the exhibition New Photography 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Employing the visual language of multiple genres—portraiture, still life, landscape, and geometric abstraction—Shahbazi pairs works to create ambivalent clusters of images. Her photographs are often described as “nomadic and unfixed,” grouped and sequenced differently for each exhibition.
Her works take on multiple forms and circulate across media: weavers stitch her photographs into carpets, while commercial sign painters re-present her images as murals. Shahbazi speaks about her interest in the surface of images; her strategies for pairing, rearranging, and reordering photographs; her engagement with the circulation of images through multiple material forms; and the continued relevance of art-historical genres within contemporary photography.
The conversation takes place online between participants in Tehran and New York City. The program is curated by Ava Ansari, Ellie Bastani, and Molly Kleiman of The Back Room, and is co-presented with Sohrab Kashani of Sazmanab and Culture Hub in New York.
Venue: Sazmanab (Sazman-e Ab St.), Eyebeam [New York City]
Date: Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Time: 7:30–9 PM



















