Bahar Behbahani’s work addresses her long-term conceptual dialogue with memory and loss, representing her chronic displacement and longing. Behbahani’s films and paintings revisit her birth country’s psychogeographic landscape of memory, while questioning perception. By blurring representations of truth and falseness, her images—moving and still, layered and literal—suspend reality in a state of hypnotic ambivalence, and yet reveal a volatile sense of place. More recently, Behbahani embarked upon a multilayered investigation, a collection of collaborative works, which encompasses a group of videos and a participatory installation, centering the role of bread in our contemporary culture through stimulating abandoned memories.
Born in Tehran, Iran, multidisciplinary artist, Bahar Behbahani lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been featured in the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Sharjah Biennial 10, UAE; The Prologue Exhibition for the 2016 Honolulu Biennial, Hawaii; Queens Museum, New York; The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan; MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art, Italy; Mirmara Museum, Croatia; The Tribeca Film Festival, New York; as well as the Asia Art Biennial, Bangladesh, among others. Behbahani was awarded an Art Omi International Artists Residency by The Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2013 and the Art and Culture Network Program Grant from the Open Society Institute, Budapest in 2011. Guggenheim Museum Curator Suzanne Cotter selected her video for the 10th Sharjah Biennial, UAE. In 2007, her video Suspended was selected ‘Best in Show’ by Carrie Springer, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art.
