About the Exhibition

In these works, I have used my self-portraits as the main theme and added various elements and symbols to tell stories. As a female artist from Iran who has lived in a society full of contradictions and limitations, I wanted to focus on the contrast between new and old beliefs that I have seen in contemporary Iranian lives. Everything is changing every day and the insane speed at which technology advances has played a crucial role in this rapid change. At the same time, the Iranian society is trying to keep the traditional ideology and culture alive. It is a great struggle between conservative and contemporary points of view. As a result, in this series, the viewer sees a headphone as a symbol of our contemporary lives. In Iran, headphones are strongly associated with the young generation, who often uses it to create a line between its  own way of life, and to avoid the society’s realities. I have also used different traditional Iranian motifs and patterns to create a contrast with the headphones. By using my self-portraits, I focus on the feeling of living between two different points o f view. and try to make a balance between them. In these recent works, I want to give my audience a moment of reflection on our fast paced lives, our life changing decisions, and perhaps my endeavour to find my identity in this complicated world of mine.

Artist Bio: Marzieh Mosavarzade finished her B.F.A. program at Islamic Azad University (Tehran Central Branch), concentrating in painting, in 2013. She has recently started her graduate studies at the University of Calgary, with a printmaking concentration. Her artistic and research practice is engaged with overlaying depictions of places, portraits and moments which she encounters every day. In these combinations, she shows the speed of change in lifestyles and human interactions. As she has lived in a society that has a hard time accepting people’s individual differences, she wants to demonstrate, through her work, that everyone has a different and unique personality and that it is unreasonable to expect them to be similar in every way.