ARTIST STATEMENT
I work across textiles, soft sculpture, video, and interactive media to explore how diasporic, gendered bodies navigate architectures of control, care, and visibility. My practice lives in the friction between material and immaterial, softness and code, tradition and technology. Rooted in personal and collective histories of displacement, it moves through the textures of cultural memory and the ruptures of migration.
I approach the convergence of fabric and digital media not as contrast, but as conceptual resistance. Embroidery, layering, and stitching—drawn from Iranian traditions passed down through generations—are not decorative but declarative. These techniques carry embedded knowledge of survival and self-definition, and I use them to engage the body—its representation and its presence—within spatial systems shaped by gender, surveillance, and power.
Digital media, often coded as disembodied or masculine, becomes in my work a site of intimacy and disruption. I merge traditional sewing with video, projection mapping, motion sensors, and interactive systems to create spaces where the viewer’s movement and touch complete the work. Fabric becomes screen. Memory becomes interface. The installation becomes a threshold between here and elsewhere.
My installations invite slowness, participation, and intimacy. They trace marginalized experience while resisting containment. In navigating the porous space between craft and technology, visibility and concealment, presence and absence, I seek to collapse binaries that have long excluded bodies like mine. My work insists on complexity, multiplicity, and embodied presence—as resistance, as ritual, and as radical continuity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ainaz Alipour is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist working across textiles, sculpture, digital media, and installation. Their practice explores diasporic identity, gendered architectures, and cultural displacement, drawing from Iranian craft traditions, personal archives, and critical media theory.
Alipour holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of South Florida, an MA in Animation and Film from Tarbiat Modares University, and a BFA in Printmaking from the Tehran University of Art. Their work has been exhibited in the U.S. and Iran, including at the Ringling Museum of Art, Vox Populi, IceBox Project Space, Mattie Kelly Art Center, and ROYGBIV Gallery, as well as in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Hormuz.
Recent exhibitions include In A Frame Whose Moment، …در قابی که گاهش … at Surel’s Place and Symptomatic Echoes at Mattie Kelly Art Center. They have participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Surel’s Place, and On::View, all with full funding, and received honors including the Margaret Miller IRA Award and Best in Show at the Emerald Coast National Exhibition.
Alipour’s media work has screened at AIFVF, SWIFF, Yellow Hammer Film Festival, and more. Their performances have appeared in both gallery and public urban contexts. They have also curated exhibitions such as Homescape Borderland at Rochester Contemporary Art Center and presented talks at institutions including the Ringling Museum and Tehran Sculpture Society.
Through layered installations and hybrid processes, Alipour reimagines spatial belonging and memory as acts of soft resistance and speculative continuity.
© Ainaz Alipour