ARTIST STATEMENT
I have always carried visions of Tehran’s mountains within me. My practice emerges from the emotional and cultural dissonance of relocation, translating feelings of displacement, memory, and shifting identity into a visual language. Through deconstruction, adaptation, and transformation, I rework everyday scenarios into metaphorical landscapes; spaces where meaning is unstable, fragmented, and constantly reforming. I often engage in absurd, ironic gestures such as the imagined act of moving mountains—to explore the impossibility of fully reconstructing what has been left behind. These gestures reflect the contradictions of living between places, of being simultaneously grounded and uprooted. Using humor as both a coping mechanism and a conceptual tool, I blur the line between absurdity and reality, crafting an ongoing dialogue with the places I inhabit and remember.
My work incorporates drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and installation to examine how cultural material shifts when relocated. It dwells in the tension between presence and absence, home and elsewhere. Ultimately, my practice is an attempt to carry fragments of place with me, while acknowledging that what is carried is always transforming—never whole, never fixed.
Since moving from Iran, I feel like I carry a piece of the mountain with me, both in my mind and in my body. The mountains now represent all the changes I’ve gone through, from the home I left to the new place I’m learning to call home.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Elmira Yousefi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores displacement, identity, and the contradictions of belonging. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, she carries visions of its mountains wherever she goes, using them as both a metaphor and material in her works. Humor plays a crucial role in her practice, sustaining an imaginary relationship with the mountain and blurring the line between absurdity and reality. Through installation, performance, drawing, and printmaking, she engages in the absurd and ironic act of moving mountains, translating the emotional and spatial dislocation of migration into a visual language.
Yousefi holds an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Florida, an MFA in painting from the Islamic University of Tehran (2017), and a BA from the University of Science and Culture, Tehran (2014). She is a recipient of the Penland School of Craft (2025). Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including a solo exhibition at 4Most Gallery.
© Elmira Yousefi