Shabnam K.Ghazi, submitted artwork
Shabnam K.Ghazi
Painting, Sculpture, Video, Installation
NYC
Shabnam K. Ghazi is a multidisciplinary visual artist born and raised in Tehran. After living and working in Toronto for more than two decades, she recently relocated to New York City. Her practice encompasses installation, sculpture, textile-based works, and moving image, addressing themes of migration, memory, and the spatial construction of belonging. Working across material and conceptual frameworks, Ghazi incorporates mirror, thread, and text to create immersive environments that engage perception and reflection. Her practice examines how personal narratives intersect with collective histories, often using correspondence, fragmentation, and repetition as structural elements. Through mirrored surfaces and woven forms, she explores the tension between visibility and concealment, presence and absence. Her recent body of work, Dear You, Dear Me – The Mailbox Series, employs correspondence as a conceptual framework, presenting sealed letters housed within mirrored mailboxes that implicate the viewer in a dialogue between interiority and public space. The work reflects ongoing investigations into displacement, memory, and the emotional architectures shaped by migration. Ghazi has exhibited internationally in Canada, the United States, Iran, and Cuba. Her work is included in both private and public collections, including the TD Bank Corporate Art Collection. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University, Toronto.
Works
Shabnam K.Ghazi, submitted artwork
My work examines memory as a constructed and evolving condition shaped by time, migration, and displacement. Rather than functioning as fixed documentation, memory operates as an edited abstraction—formed through fragmentation, omission, and reconstruction. I am interested in how recollection persists as partial narrative and how its gaps generate new meaning. Through installation, woven works, and sculptural forms, I translate fragments of personal history into spatial environments. The act of making becomes a method of revisiting and restructuring experience. Language serves as both material and structure within this process. Central to the work is the transcription of early memories using Persian calligraphy in the tradition of Siyah Mashq (Black Practice). Pages are densely covered with writing until text dissolves into image. The written surfaces are then cut into narrow strips and reassembled through weaving. This fragmentation and reconstruction mirrors the instability of memory itself. In recent installations, mirrored mailboxes house sealed letters, positioning private narrative within a public framework. Reflective surfaces implicate the viewer, merging their presence with the work and creating a dialogue between interior experience and shared space. Through these material strategies, I seek to preserve the emotional traces that endure beyond the erosion of time.
