Untitled
- Graphite and pastel on Kochi Mashi paper mounted on canvas
- 93 x 75 in
- Avish Khebrehzadeh
Born in Tehran in 1969, Avish Khebrehzadeh left her country at a very young age at the outbreak of the Revolution. She moved to Rome, where she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, and later moved to Washington DC, where she still lives and works. Khebrehzadeh's paintings, drawings, and animations are born out of her experience as an immigrant. Claiming, “mystery is good…I don’t want things definable,” she leaves her works open-ended, evoking feelings of unfamiliarity, dislocation, and unease that moving from place to place around the world stirs up within her. By combining motifs from traditional Iranian art, like floral patterning, with references to contemporary culture, Khebrehzadeh creates a visual hybridity reflective of her own multifaceted identity.
In much of her work, Avish Khebrehzadeh depicts nature – particularly trees. She explains, “Trees have always been part of my practice. They are an essential part of nature and are connected to animals. Trees connect the sky and heavens to the underworld, completing the cycle of life. There’s a mention of a tree of life in the old story of the Gilgamesh. For me, trees are a symbol of continuity … I hope that we will have continuity and a connection to nature and animals.” She also sees her engagement with nature through her art as “a way to liberate myself, to project myself somewhere else,” particularly during challenging times.
Avish Khebrehzadeh speaks about her own experience of immigration, stating: “I’m coming from Iran and in Iran there is always a talk of leaving the country. Some come back. Some don’t but they think overall because the insecurity that you always faced either is because of war or whatever you think. Then it’s hard to go back. I mean then you don’t belong anywhere then you are in between. I mean you are not… you don’t get used to anywhere. So that was immigration for me. I'm reading Edward Said these days and found the quote below. It's about exile, but to me, exile is a form of immigration: ‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an
exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.’ Hannah Arendt’s quote about refugees also resonates: ‘We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.’”
Khebrehzadeh's works has been included in recent exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Ursula Blickle Foundation, Germany; Fondazione Volume!, Rome, among others. She also participated in the Santa Fe Biennial (2010), Liverpool Biennial (2008) and 50th Venice Biennial (2003), where she was awarded the Lion D’or for her contribution to the Italian Pavilion, the “Young Italian Art Award.” Khebrehzadeh is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow and a Smithsonian Artist Research fellow.