Sara Abbaspour (born in Mashhad, Iran) is an Iranian artist and teacher who lives and works between the U.S. and Iran. She holds an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art, an MA in Photography from the University of Tehran, and a B.Sc. in Urban Planning and Design from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Sara’s works have been exhibited in the United States and internationally in solo and group exhibitions at galleries such as Aperture Foundation (New York), Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York), Erstererster Gallery (Berlin), Gallery Perchee (Online, New York), Green Gallery (New Haven), IEEE GEM Conference (Galway, Ireland), Tehran Gallery (Tehran, Iran), and Radin Gallery (Mashhad, Iran). She is currently a faculty at California Institute for the Arts.
"II"
My work as an artist originates from an interest in studying the poetics of spaces in transitional states. My undergraduate education in urban studies, as well as my lived experiences growing up in Iran, have been influential in my photographic practice. The relationship between spaces and their inhabitants in their constant state of becoming, and their herstories, are the primary subjects I am intrigued to explore. Hence, I intend to collaborate with these elements and often find my work in the meeting point of borders; between temporal and eternal, inside and out, familiar and peculiar, personal and political, seen and unseen, magic and mundane, imagined and experienced.
In II, I have employed portraiture in its extensive conceptual definition to further investigate what I’d call the constant transitional moment and what it entails. The black and white photographs in this body of work include people, cities, landscapes, and still lives, and follow interiors and exteriors transforming into each other, as mental states of connection and disassociation. Although one could read the photographs independently, I am quite interested in how individual images can offer a flow of imaginative continuity when they are revealed in sequences. Thus, I intend the work to exist not only in the isolated frames, but in the transitions between and beyond them in the sequence; where the concept of time gets challenged.
I don't consider myself separated from what conceptually and photographically interests me, so my approach towards portraiture morphs into self-portraiture, as a vessel for self-psychoanalysis; I contemplate on my evolving understanding of self in relation to the surrounding environment.
