Duet / Harmonies of the Banal
Artist Name
Nazanin Ghahramani
Artist Statement
I am a London-based artist working across drawing, painting, printmaking, and digital fabrication at the intersection of art, ethnography, and sociology. My practice explores identity formation, domestic life, spatial politics, and the everyday acts through which identities are shaped, negotiated, and sometimes collide across private and public spaces. Drawing on my background in Fine Art at the University of Tehran, I use visual research, narrative, material experimentation, and spatial thinking to create works that move beyond representation and reflect on memory, gender, family, and human conditions.
As an artist, I am always looking for media that best suits my visual research and questions, encompassing traditional drawing and painting techniques as well as digital techniques such as photography and digital fabrication. My studies in Fine Art (University of Tehran) and Architecture (University of Westminster) have given me representational tools that go beyond mere representation; creating artworks that engages with its surrounding and reflects on human conditions, such as identity, gender and spatial politics.
In my works, I navigate my immediate surrounding, using visual ethnography to reflect on the self, memory and familial relations.
Exhibition Statement
In the “Duet” collection, which is about my parents and the dynamics of co-existing, I have traced my parents’ movements and everyday acts, creating a “harmony of the banal”. The harmony (or the lack of it) between my parents, mixed with domestic objects and space of the house, represents the shared space where gendered identities are formed and negotiated.
This collection consists of a series of drawings/studies made from life, done with pen & ink on paper, as well as a series of monochromatic paintings that developed later. For me, the minimal and monochromatic colour palette means a more direct and sincere way of self-expression, and a better representation of the “harmony of the banal”, where colour (or the lack of it) captures the essence of what is to be human.
