Artist: Nina Rastgar
Exhibition Title: Chicken Factory
Exhibition Dates: April 21 - May 2, 2025
Reception and Gallery Talk: Thursday, April 24, 5:30 PM
Artist's Statement
Materials profoundly shape both my daily life and artistic practice—not only as tools for personal expression, but as mediums carrying social weight. I begin each work by recording gestures, emotions, and fragments of lived experience—not out of nostalgia or reaction, but as a way to process the present. My sketches emerge from the tension between being ethical and expressive—an inner duality shaped by the environments I move through. Objects, for me, are never static. They are dynamic carriers of human ingenuity—bridges between problem-solving, cultural identity, and shared memory.
Growing up in an ethnic community in Gilan, northern Iran, under a totalitarian regime, I witnessed firsthand how social norms could suppress individual identity. In that context, crafting and performing were not just creative acts; they became ways of living. They were subversive gestures—acts of personal knowledge, subcultural expression, and communal resilience.
Rooted in object-based making, my visual research navigates the intersection of craft, performance, and pedagogy. Over the past three years, my practice has evolved between two worlds—the duality of time and space shaped by the distance between Iran and the United States. This torn existence reflects the tension between imposed and reclaimed identities. Through installations and performative encounters, I aim to create spaces not for resolution but for questioning. Within this visual language, the body—my body—becomes a site of inquiry inside a rigid binary structure that governs how we are expected to move, appear, and exist.
Artist Biography
Nina Rastgar was raised in northern Iran among the Gilaki-speaking community in Gilan’s lush, green province. They are currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, where they also serve as a Graduate Assistant. As a Presidential Fellow, Nina’s research explores the conceptual strength of art in relation to socio-political climates and cultural contexts. Drawing from lived experiences both within and outside Iran, their work investigates how systems of power shape perceptions of human value in the modern world.
Nina’s artistic practice has received both national and international recognition, with exhibitions across Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Iran. Their sketchbooks and creative process are featured in an interview with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), with a forthcoming publication by Yale University Press. During their time in the United States, Nina has received multiple scholarships from esteemed craft institutions, including the Penland School of Craft, Center for Metal Arts, Peters Valley School of Craft, Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft, and the John C. Campbell Folk School.