Nazgol Ansarinia

Attempts at building a wall, 2018

Green Art Gallery

Nazgol Ansarinia is an Iranian contemporary artist whose work thoughtfully examines the social, architectural, and linguistic structures that shape everyday life in Iran, particularly in Tehran. Born in 1979 in Tehran and raised partly during the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War, her childhood was marked by rapid urban change, political tension, and shifting cultural norms—conditions that later became central to her artistic inquiry. Educated in the United States, where she studied art and design, Ansarinia returned to Iran with a sharpened awareness of how power, ideology, and modernization are embedded in ordinary systems such as housing, language, maps, and instructional diagrams. Her art spans drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, often using minimalist aesthetics and precise research to deconstruct familiar objects like apartment floor plans, textbooks, or traffic symbols, revealing how they quietly regulate behavior and shape collective memory. Rather than making overt political statements, Ansarinia’s purpose is to expose the subtle mechanisms through which authority and social order are internalized, inviting viewers to reconsider what they accept as neutral or functional. Her restrained, conceptually rigorous approach has earned her international recognition, including exhibitions at major institutions and participation in global biennials, positioning her as a key voice in contemporary Middle Eastern art. Ansarinia’s influence lies in her ability to merge personal experience with systemic critique, offering a model of politically aware art that is quietly incisive, intellectually demanding, and deeply rooted in place.