Shadi Harouni

(L to R): Sunken Garden: Beheshte Zahra Cemetery, Section 33, 2018, digital C-prints, 16.5 x 11.8 inches each; The Owl’s Made a Nest in the Ruins of the Heart (film still), 2021, UHD 4:3, Duration 19:00

Shadi Harouni’s research and material investigations are rooted in disavowed histories of erasure and resistance that span from everyday acts of dissent to global mass movements, from modern revolutions in the Middle East to ancient transgressions in thought and poetry. Harouni’s practice weaves together modes and media—film and photography, sculpture and site-specific interventions with text and folklore. She works with spaces, objects, and sentient subjects imbued with both the utopian dreams and broken promises of liberation and revolution. Harouni’s films and photographs, set in time-worn dwellings, factories, and diminishing mountain quarries throughout her ancestral Kurdistan are intimate studies of the histories of resistance in the region, centering the contributions of women to ongoing struggles for freedom and self-determination.

Shadi Harouni (b.1985, Hamedan, Iran) is a visual artist based in New York City. Harouni’s projects have been exhibited in biennials and museums internationally, including the Queens Museum (NY), Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), Prague City Museum (CZ), Museo d’Arte Orientale (IT). She has been awarded prizes and residencies from the Gattuso Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she also served as Acting Director in 2019. Harouni is a 2024-25 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video. Shadi Harouni is an educator, Professor and Head of Video and Photography at New York University Steinhardt Department of Art.