Behnaz Ghasempour

Lives and works in Harrisonburg, Virginia

Artist statement

My practice explores the invisible relationships through which identity, memory, and belonging are formed. Working across drawing, installation, mixed media, and portraiture, I consider the self not as an isolated or fixed subject, but as something continually shaped through relationships with others. Drawing and line are central to my practice. Repeated faces and layered portraits accumulate across translucent surfaces, while thread, stitching, copper, and suspended materials extend drawing into physical space. Each material carries its own language: thread suggests connection and continuity; transparency allows images and histories to overlap; copper records transformation through oxidation and time. Together, these materials make visible the traces people leave within one another. Large-scale portraits often become sites where individual and collective presence intersect. Faces emerge, disappear, and reappear through layers, while shadows and shifting viewpoints complicate the boundary between one figure and another. In my installations, viewers move among suspended works, encountering images differently as their position changes. This physical movement transforms portraiture from a fixed image into a relational and spatial experience. Across my work, I am interested in how presence can persist through absence, how memory is carried materially and collectively, and how individual identity is inseparable from the relationships that shape it. Through accumulation,...

Artwork