Video from Zahra Baseri’s artist talk, given on June 24th 2022.
“Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant is a multi-media exhibition that addresses the atrocities of an oppressive ruling system in Iran that continually and deliberately uses socio-political suppression to control its citizens. From the viewpoint of an Iranian living in Canada, I create images, objects, and spaces that investigate power dynamics, means and instruments of power, omission, and censorship, among others. I employ allegory and representation of culturally significant imagery from Persian and Islamic art and architecture as my formal language. While accentuating the importance of materiality, my work questions the subject-object duality to more profoundly bring the political into the material realm.”
Zahra Baseri is an Iranian-Canadian artist who has a BFA Honors from the University of Manitoba (2016) and an MFA from the University of Waterloo (2019). She continued her research in Lisbon, Portugal, through Maumaus, an independent study program in 2020. Baseri was Manitoba’s provincial winner for BMO 1st Art! (2016), and received the University of Waterloo Fine Arts highest honour of achievement, the Sylvia Knight Award (2019).