Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 14, 2024: Sara Madandar, an emerging Iranian multi-disciplinary artist (#2050)

Sara Madandar is an Iranian multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in New Orleans. She received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and her BA in painting from Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran. Through a range of media such as painting, video, installation, and performance, Madandar explores migration and the human experience of living between cultures, using the aesthetics of language, architecture, clothing, and bodies to study the complexities of cross-cultural experiences. Most recently, she was in residency at Joan Mitchell Center and Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI). Sara is also a co-founder of the Parlour Gallery and Camp Street Studios, an artist-run space in the heart of New Orleans' downtown art district. Some of her accolades include an award from the Texas Visual Artists Association (TVAA) and an award from the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) for work presented in an exhibition curated by Jessica Beck of the Andy Warhol Museum. Sara’s work has been featured at New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, Austin City Hall, Elisabeth Ney Museum, Elga Wimmer PCC (NYC), and many others.

My work is about the relationship of humans to their bodies and body coverings, such as clothes and hair, and how the body relates to notions of the home, place, belonging, and the public and private spheres. Like those relationships, my work changes and evolves every day. I use the images I create to tell stories of my life—about joy and pain, oppression and resistance—finding a common thread within those stories to connect myself to the life stories of others. Having grown up in Iran, and later having moved to the United States, the tension of living in between cultures has been an ever-evolving inspiration for these themes. In my artwork, I often use the dimensions of my own body as a template and starting point for telling these stories, and as way to express my critique of the forced veiling and erasure of female bodies in my native Iran.

In my process, I first develop a concept and then think of a medium and techniques that best express my ideas. In most of my collections, I use or create new materials, media, or techniques, combining them with painting to rethink the boundaries between media and disciplines. This involves methods and media that go far beyond canvas and paint: incorporating techniques such as sewing, a “feminine” domestic art I grew up seeing in the home which both upsets and revitalizes my creative process through the visceral, mechanical, novel-yet-familiar experience of the machine; or materials such as human hair, an object of both desire and disgust depending on its context and a deeply politicized element of human corporality in Iran.

Deeply inspired by the immediacy and physicality of performance art, I have worked to integrate materials and designs that interact with the viewer and the environment, such as LED lights that respond to the presence of a human body or ambient light levels to alter the appearance of my works. Working through the making and remaking of self that is inherent to the experience of migration, I have sought to tell this story in my work through methods that deconstruct the artwork and its primary medium, the canvas, whether through burning, cutting, or unravelling the canvas, or destabilizing the viewer’s understanding of its spatiality and orientation by creating hidden images on the reverse that can only be revealed through special lighting techniques. All of these methods work to manipulate the viewer’s understanding of the human body and the body of the artwork—the canvas—in relation to its coverings, adornments, and shelters, navigating notions of the public and private, home and belonging, covered and exposed, throughout the experience of migration between cultures.

© 2024. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Sara Madandar or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only