A gate to the future imprinted with your organs
See them float
Hanging from the ancient past by the weak thread of justice,
Like a figment of one and a picture of the other
You will delight in your sins,
Your trembling body will revenge his anxiety
As a bright cry chants your virtue, forever bearing you.
- Koushna Navabi
Koushna Navabi's practice encompasses sculpture, installation, and painting with a focus on textiles to reinterpret “feminine” techniques as an expressive code.
Drawing on cultural myths to explore themes of East and West, Iran and otherness, Koushna Navabi’s work refers to Orientalism and gender identity and is often characterised by a provocative interplay between the personal and the socio-political. Her practice, with its focus on the three-dimensional form interlaces eroticism with politics, evoking tender and erotic nuances of horror and expressing a female viewpoint on suppression and sensuality.
She combines 19th century European fabric and stitching with traditional Persian kilims and sculpted or found objects, to dismantle a range of cultural categories, rules, and dogmas and explore the constant rub of the familiar and domestic against the surreal and the strange.
Koushna Navabi was born in Iran. She left shortly after 1979 revolution and moved to the US and later to the UK. She completed her MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London University in 1995. She exhibits regularly in group and solo shows in the UK and internationally.
Koushna Navabi (Iran) is in residence at the Cité internationale des arts with the support of the Institut français.