Residency Shirana Shahbazi

From April until June 2022, the Iranian/Swiss visual artist Shirana Shahbazi (°1974) will take up residency at the research group Thinking Tools. Her artistic practice has been shaped by the desire to question and expand the boundaries of the photographic medium. Inspired by an earlier residency in India, in 2018, she will use the residency period in Antwerp to further explore the technique of hand coloring photographic images, a slowly disappearing craft in photography. Through a careful study of the different artisan methods used to apply color to images, she aims to develop a new, fully handmade body of work. Stressing the importance of her own bodily involvement in creating these images, she aims to question the general dematerialization of image making in the current digital age.

Shirana Shahbazi, Kandalama, 2019 (Four-colored lithography on cotton paper - 70 x 50 cm.)