with the passage of time
self portrait
The Orange Raquet Team, 2008
woman with the pearl earings
Persian carpet series
in between
woman and rose
woman and rose
SAMIRA ALIKHANZADEH Iranian, born 1967
Alikhanzadeh lives and work in Tehran. She exhibits regularly in her home country and has taken part in many group exhibitions internationally, including Whispered Secrets, Murmuring Dreams and Masques of Shahrazad at the Mall Galleries in London and Broken Promises, Forbidden Dreams at the Iran Heritage Foundation in London. Her early work featured many windows, focusing on the effects of light on interiors when filtering through windows. The methods have changed in her current work, but she retains the concept of looking through windows as she takes the position of an observer by creating window-like openings to the interiors within her compositions. Human figures and forms are introduced in ‘found photographs’. Purely by accident, Alikhanzadeh chanced upon a box of old photographs, depicting mainly women and children, which she took home and began applying to her canvases. To these she often applies shards of mirror and through the resulting reflections, she incorporates the viewer into her pieces, and so encourages us to think about our identity and heritage. She explains that “the viewer in turn becomes a part of the composition and possible descendants of the subjects, looking into a past, or perhaps , satisfying their voyeuristic urge to enter the lives and memories of generations gone by.” Although her subjects are unidentified, they are infused with philosophical questions of identity, existence and time.