Barbad Golshiri

Barbad Golshiri is an Iranian artist born in 1982 in Tehran, where he still lives and works. He studied painting at the School of Art and Architecture in Tehran and works with various media, including video, photography, installations, and performance. Inspired by a general desire for change, which he finds in the inscription on the rearview mirror of Homage to Ahmer Miralaei from 2005—“objects are closer than they may appear”—he offers a profound reflection. For him, change does not mean erasing one’s past; it signifies resisting the new rules established after the revolution.

At the third prize event during the Sixth Contemporary Art Biennale in Tehran in 2005, he created a photographic work titled The Portrait of the Artist as the Winner, in which he holds a trophy like a true winner while unrolling a roll of toilet paper featuring a French inscription: “Despite doing everything to lose, I won.”

Interested in how media can manipulate regimes and masses through images and interviews, he produced another self-portrait in 2005 titled The Portrait of the Artist as a One-Year-Old, where his photograph is altered and inverted to depict a child with a wrinkled face, resembling an old person, illustrating the precariousness of situations and the consequences of violence. In Persian, the word for "inverted" is the same term used for "photograph." On the right side of the work, there is an inscription that reads, “Barbad, when he was one, 62”—where 1362 is the year in the Persian calendar, suggesting that the child would be 62 years old in our calendar.

Another notable work from 2009 is A Plasticist Composition, which features an entirely white canvas with a Braille inscription reading “nothing to see.”