Helia Pouyanfar

Lives and works in Berkeley, CA

Artist statement

My interdisciplinary art practice investigates the permanently transient state of the refugee body and its negotiations and reconciliation with Place. Grounded in lived experiences of exile and through a poetic visual language, I utilize sculpture, photography, printmaking, and moving-image to explore and remedy the refugee body’s inherent need to belong. Focused on addressing issues of access, archive, and imagination, I examine the relationship to the past or the possibility of envisioning futures when the body is denied the permission to Place. How does one inhabit the world while being perpetually in motion? Inspired by artists and writers who engage with politics of displacement, relation, mobility, and architecture—such as Siah Armajani, Niloufar Emamifar, Larissa Sansour, Doris Salcedo, Sarah Sze, Édouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Hito Steyerl, Gaston Bachelard, and Julia Kristeva—I see my current practice as a poetic negotiation with notions of Place. Situated between the impossibility of return and the continual deferral of arrival, I seek to interrogate the dislocated subject’s entanglement with illegible geographies and fragmented memory. Positioning this sense of “disorientation” not as a momentary lapse in orientation, but as the structuring condition of diasporic existence, I see architecture as the poetry of the nomad through which one can expand on the refugee body’s poetic disposition. These conceptual explorations inform my treatment of space and...

Artwork