ARTIST STATEMENT
Making art is a way of thinking, a language that bridges my inner world and the environment around me. I use materials drawn from daily life to translate thoughts into visible form. These materials carry social, cultural, and political weight, allowing me to express ideas grounded in lived experience. Through my practice, I’ve come to understand that personality is political, every form reflects broader systems of power, bureaucracy, documents, and identity. I view objects as dynamic vessels of human ingenuity, carrying traces of sub-cultural and individual expression. By installing material within space, I create sculptural environments that speak to care, activism, and connection. My practice explores how materials can hold knowledge, communicate stories, and function as social commentary, bridging the personal with the collective.
Making and performing, for me, are survival tools, deeply rooted in resilience, and nonconformity. Living between Iran and the United States has shaped a layered understanding of identity, one defined by the tension between imposed roles and the quiet act of reclaiming selfhood in a world that often refuses to see it. This dual existence brings a constant expectation to explain, advocate for, and prove one’s identity within systems built to regulate and suppress it. My work is personal, yet it holds a social dimension. It begins with questioning, while high systems view the body as an object to commodify, reducing emotions and lived experience to marketable traits, I conceptualize the body as a crime scene in my work, marked by surveillance, violation, and resistance.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nina Rastgar (b. 1988, Gilan, Iran) is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist and educator working across performance, sculpture, craft, and installation. They were raised among the Gilaki-ethnic communities of Gilan province—a region known for its deep traditions in agriculture and craft. Nina’s work draws from a lived understanding of rural labor, cultural suppression, and acts of resistance. Their practice explores the intersections of censorship, body autonomy, and material storytelling. They often use their bodies as performance sites to confront systems of control and open channels of communication between the individual and society.
Currently based in Columbia, South Carolina, Nina is completing their MFA as a Presidential Fellow and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of South Carolina. Since 2022, they have taught Introduction to Jewelry (ARTS 255) and supported a range of interdisciplinary art courses within the School of Visual Arts and Design at McMaster College. Their pedagogy emphasizes hands-on learning, conceptual exploration, and social awareness—drawing from personal experience, political history, and a deep sensitivity to material language. Over the past three years in the United States, Nina has received scholarships from renowned craft institutions including the Penland School of Craft, Peters Valley School of Craft, the Center for Metal Arts, the John C. Campbell Folk School, and Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft. Their work has received both national and international recognition, with exhibitions held in Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, the UK, the US, and Iran. In 2025, Nina is a PhD candidate in Media Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University.
© Nina Rastgar