Ala Dehghan

Her recent solo exhibitions include “The Upside-down Scenery” at Kalfayan Galleries in Athens, and “I can explain everything” at Thomas Erben Gallery in New York. She has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and The Delfina Foundation. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2013.
Socio-political perceptions are inevitable in a context full of political seeds – where even objects have implicit political stigmas. Her work explores the relationships between the Self and Others, in connection with objects, emphasizing dialogues that culminate when tragedy and excitement converge as an uprising. Using “mise en abîme” – as a structure inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights” – she creates stories within a story.
By deconstructing her memory into fragments that are later reshuffled, stacked, layered in matched and mismatched ways, she creates emotional puzzles, enacting imaginary archives that are intertwined with labyrinthine socio-political connotations. Thus they acquire a new identity with new layers of complexity, acting as scaffolding to archives and memories to be imagined.  These installations are the sort of daily lunacy – expressed through a variety of moods, materials, gestures, light, textures, along with both specificity and erasure of time and space – that evoke the remembrance of people through their absence.