Maryam Mohammadi is a freelance photographic artist (documentary and staged photography) and curator from Tehran, Iran.
For Maryam Mohammadi, photography is an outlet with which she can make visible what she feels. Photography is also a means of dealing with social issues. She often focuses on the topics of gender, socialisation and migration. Mohammadi repeatedly refers to women in different cultural, religious and social contexts. She dedicated her doctoral thesis to the subject of “Photography and Feminism”. The photographic artist was a lecturer at the Tehran University of Art for several years.
Since 2009 she lives and works in Graz. In addition to academic teaching and workshops as well as numerous exhibitions and projects, she has already received several awards for her works, including the Art Promotion Prize of the City of Graz in 2013. Maryam Mohammadi has been on the board of directors of XENOS – Association for the Promotion of Socio-Cultural Diversity for several years. In recent years she has worked in intercultural, feminist adult education and youth centres. Since 2015 she has been a member of the Graz Women’s Council.
The photographer has exhibited several times in Iran and Europe and curated photo exhibitions in Iran, the Czech Republic and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Belgium is also no stranger to the artist. In 2019, she was the first six-month Artist-in-Europe fellow from the province of Styria to have a studio in the Wiels, the centre for contemporary art in Brussels.
During these six months the work #me_in_brussels was created. The artist writes: “Without a common language and knowledge of the city, I felt completely foreign in Brussels, where I lived as a temporary resident like many others. Only with time did I get a sense of the diversity in art and cultures of this international city. The metro lines played a major role in this, serving as connecting lines between the most diverse and contradictory parts of the city. So I commute between my apartment in the migrant-dominated Molenbeek and the EU quarter, where I interview EU parliamentarians from different countries on feminist issues. The station at Midi station is another important junction on the way to my studio. It is the metro stations that give me a picture of the city and have become bridgeheads of orientation and familiarity for me. With the photo series #me_in_brussels I want to inscribe my presence in this for me new city.”
The video contribution Hug_u_later was created as part of the “Artist in Isolation” project at the Kunsthalle Graz. In it Mohammadi deals with the questions of being an artist in times of corona crisis and isolation, inspired by her own fate as an Iranian living in Austria.
