Biography
TBahar Behbahani is a multidisciplinary artist whose work stages an ongoing conceptual dialogue with memory and erasure. Her research-based practice interweaves archival materials, cartography, horticultural history and contemporary context to critique imperial structures of knowledge and power. Behbahani juxtaposes personal and social histories, illuminating the parallels and dynamics at work between historiography and present sociopolitical circumstances.
Behbahani’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Immigrant Flora: Rising Under, site-specific mural, The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College, PA (2022); All Water Has a Perfect Memory, Wave Hill Garden, Bronx, New York (2019); Let the Garden Eram Flourish, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover (2017); and Garden Coup, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2016).
She has also participated in many group exhibitions such as at Asia Society Museum, New York (2022); 2nd Lahore Biennale (2020); What's Love Got To Do With It?, The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2019); re:home, for Freedoms exhibition, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Active Forms, Sharjah Art Foundation (2018); 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017); 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); and Chain of Fire, The Prologue Exhibition for the 2016 Honolulu Biennial, Honolulu, HI (2014); among others.
Her work is part of the collections at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Time Equities, New York; Columbia Hospital, New York and Sharjah Art Foundation.
Behbahani participated in a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, US (2017) and
is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2020) and Creative Capital Award (2019)
She received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in painting from Tehran University of Art in 1995 and 1998, respectively.
Born in 1973 in Tehran, Behbahani currently lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.
SAF participation:
Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023)
