About

Koushna Navabi is an American-British artist born in Iran in 1962 where she was trained as a ballet dancer at the Conservatory School of Music in Tehran from a young age. After the revolution of 1979 and the establishment of Islamic Republic of Iran, she fled the country aged 16 and alone for the US where, for many years she lived as an illegal immigrant in New York and Los Angeles. Having been self-taught, she moved to London in 1993 to complete an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London University and graduated in 1995. She currently lives and works in London and exhibits regularly in group and solo shows in the UK and internationally.

Navabi's multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, installation, painting, and works in textile often reinterpreting “feminine” techniques as an expressively ironic code. Drawing on cultural myths referring to Orientalism and gender identity to explore themes of East and West, Iran and otherness, the work is often characterised by an ironic and provocative interplay between the personal and the socio-political.

The work, with its distinct focus on the three-dimensional form interlaces eroticism with politics, evoking the tender and erotic nuances of horror and expressing a female viewpoint on suppression and sensuality. She often combines fabric and stitches with traditional Persian kilims and sculpted or found objects and her use of craft technique with its strong references to folkloric primitivism function to illuminate the dreadful alienation that hangs over so much of the work.

Navabi’s interest in knitted surfaces and sculptures spans over two decades from Untitled Polo-Neck (1995), a knitted sweater with 10-meter-long necklines, to the series of oil paintings At the Edge of Chaos and Order, Where Flesh Matters No. 3. (2018), in which the painted brush strokes realistically mimic a knitted surface defined by the viewer’s physical focal point view. In Myrrha, (2022), a female body is exposed, petrified, and punished for her immoral sexual desire while the virtuosic knitted-surface painting of an oil rig expresses an ironic challenge to the socio-political-economic provocations of East and West. The experience is of dismantling a range of cultural categories, rules, and dogmas, exploring the constant rub of the familiar and domestic against the surreal and the strange, projecting a very personal inner emotionality and psychological landscape.