SMALL GALLERY
November 24 – December 22, 2023
Aileen Bahmanipour
Sketches For Investment Plans
Reception + Artist Talk: Friday, November 24th at 5pm
Sketches For Investment Plans is a multidisciplinary installation based on an accumulation of diagrams collected by the artist from Google Image searches for “How to invest in Iran?” in March 2019. This was when sanctions employed on Iran caused great financial pressure for Iranians all over the world.
As an Iranian immigrant, Bahmanipour inhabits notions of unpredictable futures and unstable presents, normalized through her traumatic socio-political experiences and history. She explores how our lives are exposed to massive data collection, which are in turn analysed and interpreted by institutions with specific aims and goals.
Her creative process is entangled with images, how and why we make them, and how we interact with them. Since 2009 when the Iranian regime’s restrictions maximized Internet filters, her practice became obsessed with the diagrammatic imagery that was available to her through limited access to information. Perhaps because they were neutral, and not political at all. She recycles diagrammatic imagery to make new circuits and patent files of non-functional systems that blur the borders, and transforms these diagrams into different visual forms of study in systematic non-functionality and stupidity.
Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist. She is currently living and working on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, known as Vancouver, and in Bella Coola Valley, the traditional territory of Nuxalk people. She received her BFA in Painting from the Tehran University of Art and her MFA from the University of British Columbia. She is currently a member of the Continuing Studies faculty at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Bahmanipour has exhibited her works internationally as well as in Canada, including her solo and group exhibitions at the GlogauAIR (Berlin), Banff Centre for the Arts, Alternator Centre for the Contemporary Arts (Kelowna), Vancouver’s grunt gallery, Two Rivers Gallery (Prince George), and Aaran Art gallery (Tehran).
She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in 2017, the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Artist Fund in 2019, the Early Career Development grant from BC Arts Council in 2019, the Linda and Richard Singleton Endowment Fund in 2022, the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council’s grants in 2021 and 2022.
