Statement:

A gate to the future imprinted with your organs

See them float

Hanging from the ancient past by the weak thread of justice,

Like a picture of one and a picture of the other

You will delight in your sins,

Your trembling body will revenge his anxiety

As a bright cry chants your virtue, forever bearing you.

 Kushna Navabi///

Koushna Navabi's practice has fabric as its main material, which she works in the form of sculptures, installations, paintings and poetry, as a reinterpretation of "feminine" techniques as an expressive code.

Drawing inspiration from cultural myths to explore themes of East and West, Iran and otherness, Koushna Navabi's work refers to Orientalism and gender identity and often characterized by a provocative tension between personal history and socio-political history. Her practice, mainly sculptural, mixes eroticism and politics, evoking the tender and erotic nuances of horror and expressing a feminine point of view on repression and sensuality. She combines 19th century European fabrics and sewing techniques with traditional Persian kilims and carved or found objects, in order to deconstruct a series of cultural categories, rules and dogmas and explore the constant friction of the familiar and the domestic against the fantastic and the strange.

Koushna Navabi (Iran) is in residence at the Cité internationale des arts through the Institut français. She left her country shortly after the 1979 revolution and settled in the United States, then in the United Kingdom. A graduate of Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1995, her work is regularly exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in the UK and overseas.