Setareh Shahbazi
Why Not Bazar
Curated by Regine Basha

Iranian-born, Berlin-based Setareh Shahbazi’s exhibition Why Not Bazar examines intersections and collisions between different cultural locations and their traditions. Shahbazi culls from images found in her daily life and surroundings. Pictures from different sources like magazines, newspapers, postcards, billboards, and advertisements as well as pictures that she takes on location, create the basis for her two-and three-dimensional collages. As the artist has often traveled between Western Europe and the Middle East, her image collection naturally combines scenes from different East/West cultures—though her treatment of these transitions are subtle and elusive. She asserts, “My work gets shape in a fluent process that is always closely connected to what I am surrounded with, be it in Beirut, Berlin, or Los Angeles.”

Using a highly colored palette as a kind of lens, Shahbazi’s iconic images act as filters for what could be a charged psychological state, a collective memory, a mediated news item, or just a fleeting banal scene. With deft spatial and compositional concern for a given architecture, Shahbazi employs these images as actors on a stage, various media including flat ink-jet prints, installations placards, platforms, and theatrical tableaus.