Alborz Kazemi

Alborz Kazemi (b. 1989) is a photographer who has a detailed, curious, and inquisitive look at his family, his surroundings, and his place of residence. This type of approach, which can be seen in the "Silence" and "Comardship" photo collections, is one of the characteristics of Kazemi's works in the first decade of his career.

Kazemi was present in the second operation to liberate Mosul, Iraq. The traces of this experience are visible in the "Encounter/Encounter" and "Pieces of Body" collections. After this period, his approach to issues and phenomena became different. He no longer searches for visual truth in the reality around him and intends to show his lived experience to the audience through mental images.

Alborz Kazemi studied at Kamal-ol Molk Fine Arts School and graduated in painting in 2007. He exhibited his works for the first time in 2008 in the "Tasvir-e Sal" annual group exhibition. After finishing his education, his interest in photography and cinema increased, and in 2008 he completed the cinematography and photography course at the Young Cinematography Center. He held his first solo exhibition called "The Silence" in 2010 at the No.6 Art Gallery in Tehran. Simultaneously with the exhibition, this collection of photos was published in the form of a book by Nazar publishing. In these photos, he recorded the life of his grandparents as an absent observer.

In 2016, Kazemi set up the exhibition "Pieces of Body" at Dastan Electricroom. The show was an installation of six collaged images of photographs he had taken of the human body. These images were slowly projected onto the wall in a dark space through an enlarger lens, evoking luminous sculptures. In these collage-like works that continue to this day, he depicts the multi-layered games and struggles of his mind by showing the distorted and disfigured human body.

In the "Encounter/Encounter" exhibition held in 2019 at Dastan Electricroom, he displayed the photos and videos he recorded during the Mosul liberation from ISIS soldiers and depicted the results of war and destruction in an apocalyptic atmosphere. Another part of the images of this exhibition was related to the last period of his grandfather's life, which indirectly dealt with the issue of death. In this exhibition, he showed how he narrates a collective issue in a personal way and how he expands an individual narrative to a collective concern.

Alborz Kazemi has two different approaches to the medium of photography and the use of this material. He is faithful to analog photography in many of his photos, and the long time that exists between the recording of the photo and its development and printing is interesting to him. But in recent years, by manipulating, cutting, and collaging the photos he took of the bodies of the people around him, he brings the image he used to represent as a photo, closer to a three-dimensional object.