Farnaz Gholami
Location: London
Biography
Farnaz Gholami is an Iranian, UK-based artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking and installation.
She graduated with Distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art studying MA in Fine Art Painting in the years of 2017-2019.
She has been the recipient of The UCL Olive Prize, shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, and a finalist in Tiffany and Co. x Outset’s Studio Makers Prize in 2019. She has studied Studio Art at Brandeis University, Boston, USA in 2013 and holds a Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, 2017.
Her works have been shown by Niru Ratnam Gallery, Bomb Factory Foundation, and Yamamoto Keiko in London and have been part of shows in the USA, Ecuador, Iran and, South Africa.
Submitted work
Title: Buildings of a Misremembered Past
About the work
These series of paintings are the depiction of three cinema theatre buildings in Tehran, Iran which were built in the sixties. These buildings belong to a specific moment in time where Western brutalist architecture was considered utopic and futuristic. Today (perhaps the perceived future for the sixties), the buildings are decayed, abandoned, and neglected. Inspired by the dystopian sci-fi novel ’The High-Rise’ by J.G.Ballard, in these paintings the nature is starting to grow over fragments of these buildings, creating a non-place, an ambiguous space that does not reflect a definable singular narrative and is suggesting a new unknown space. These paintings are the liminal space between utopia and dystopia, where the failure of humans in conquering the future of the earth, is defeated by the vitality and regrowth of nature.
“For me, art is a process of making sense of lived experiences, that are not comprehensible through language. It is a space where multiple narrations and layers coexist, and the familiar and the ambiguous have equal values.
Winning this prize would be a great encouragement. It will facilitate me in having more time and resources in the studio to take my art practice further.”
