Fariba Hajamadi

Fariba Hajamadi (born 1957; ) is an Iranian-born American painter, installation artist, and photographer. Her work is created on fabric, canvas, and wood panels, often presented as large scale installations. Hajamadi work investigates cultural and gender Identity, as well as narratives of displacement, and dissects the cultural institution from the point of view of a cultural outsider both as a woman and as someone born in a non-Western culture. She lives in New York City.

Background Fariba Hajamadi was born in 1957, in Isfahan, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran).

She left her native country of Iran in 1976, to pursue fine arts studies and received her BFA degree in painting from Western Michigan University. Hajamadi subsequently received her MFA degree at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), studying under Jonathan Borofsky, and first generation conceptual artists John Baldessari, Michael Asher. Her fellow students included Ashley Bickerton, Christopher Williams, Kate Ericson, Mel Ziegler and Bill Wurtz. Artwork The starting point, for Hajamadi, is her photographs of the interiors of institutions devoted to the preservation of art and culture. Her large scale works are a seamless collage made by compositing multiple layers of photographs, of the same location from different vantage points or by combining different locations. A new interior with a forced symmetry and perspective allows the viewer to see an interior from the center and the periphery at the same time. Her architectural interiors are fictional, dense with meaning, and have a quality of displacement that verges on the surreal. Her work where the line between photography and painting are blurred engages the viewer in a discourse on cultural identities, representation of the female, photography and historical truths. Since the 1980s, Fariba Hajamadi has been producing artworks that set out to diagram and re-construct the Western narrative of the “Other". Her use of such critical tactics began before they had entered the mainstream of contemporary artistic practice. Hajamadi began by examining the museum as the locus of Occidental civilization's reading of non-Western forms and practices. Hajamadi tacitly declared it to be something like the scene of a perpetual crime against humanity, insofar as it enshrines the trophies of a deep cultural misunderstanding. Hajamadi has developed a unique art practice; a hybrid of photography, painting and installation, that endeavors to invent a relationship to the slippery conditions of autobiography. She stretches the parameters of photography to achieve work of profound emotional resonance. One of the most powerful qualities of Hajamadi's work has been its psychological weight, which channels the mind's eye into her charged spaces.

Exhibition Hajamadi has exhibited her work and installations in the United States and internationally since mid 1980s. Some of her solo exhibitions include: Musée de La Roche-sur-Yon, ICA Philadelphia, Queens Museum. Rhona Hoffman Gallery Chicago, Christine Burgin Paris, Maureen Paley London.

Group exhibitions Hajamadi has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout her career. Some of these include:

Departure Lounge, MoMA PS1, New York Fake, The New Museum, New York Transmute, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago L’Hiver de l’Amour, MAM/ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris Echolot, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany Strange Home, Museum August Kestner, Hannover, Germany Remote Connections, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland Ecbatana, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark Remote Connections, Neue Galerie Graz, Austria ORIENT/ATION, Fourth Biennial of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey Altrove fra immagine e identità, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Prato

Literature Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices. p178-182 Dan Cameron, Reconciling Opposites, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. . 32 p. Joshua Decter, Fariba Hajamadi: The Invention of Disappearance, Musée de La Roche-sur-Yon, France . 18 p. Joshua Decter, The Invisible Mirror of Memory, Galeries Magazine No36 APR/MAY 1990. 108-109 Gary Indiana Fariba Hajamadi, ICA, Philadelphia Chris Dercon, A Different corner, Museo de Arte Moderno , Cuenca, Ecuador Rosetta Brooks, Fariba Hajamadi: 20/20 Vision, CEPA Journal, Winter