In Studio Artist Residency: Farshid Bazmandegan
October 25, 2025 — January 10, 2026
Farshid Bazmandegan (b. 1985, Iran) is an Iranian-American visual artist whose work investigates the complex entanglements of memory, history, and violence within the ongoing experience of displacement. Born a few years after the Iranian Revolution and during the Iran–Iraq War, Bazmandegan grew up under systems of state oppression targeting his family for their Baha’i faith. In his early twenties he was forced to leave Iran and came to the United States alone as a refugee; he has been unable to return since. He lives and works in San Diego, California.
Bazmandegan received a BA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego and an MFA in Sculpture from UCLA. His multidisciplinary practice spanning installation, sculpture, painting, and video creates immersive environments in which personal narrative, collective histories, and embodied experience cohere as a landscape of psyche and politics. Through this lens, his work addresses absence, otherness, and the enduring effects of sociopolitical rupture.
In alignment with the residency theme Dreaming as Resistance, Bazmandegan’s project draws upon a vivid childhood memory of a painting depicting a black horse in a forest that once hung on the wall of his home in Iran. This image, gifted by a family friend while imprisoned as a political and religious minority, became for him a symbol of liberation and the imaginative possibility of return. During the residency he has translated this memory into both physical and digital forms—a sculptural embodiment of the horse and a fantasy animated sequence in which the horse carries him back to a home he can no longer access. Through these works, Bazmandegan explores dreaming not as escapism but as an act of radical defiance and future-making, reclaiming connection to place and identity in the face of exile.
Please note: This studio is open during special hours only. The next open studio is Saturday, January 10, 2026. See more details here.
Website: farshidbazmandegan.com
Instagram: @farshidbazmandegan
