Iranian-bornartist Sara Niroobakhsh is internationally established for her performative andvisual concepts that engage the globalizing feminine psyche. Working in video,photography, painting, and found objects, the inner dialogue of a woman’s dutyversus desire is a theme that threads through all of the artist’s works. Her performance-basedphotography series, ‘Rainfall’, which received a Banff Centre Residency Award and debutedat Art Space Hamra in Beirut in 2015, illustrates the silent dance between thebanal and the mystical that takes place in ordinary women’s work. In ‘The Party’, the artist’s latest installation at Gallery 44, supportedby an Ontario Arts Council Grant, ritual becomes an artistic tool to engageIranian archetypes of womanhood and social narratives of self. Using tea traysto reference the cultural workings of Iranian hospitality or ‹taarof›, thepiece asks us to reflect on the simultaneous elevation and erasure of self thatdefines acts of service. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work have been heldat the Czech China Contemporary Museum in Beijing, the Florida Museum ofPhotographic Arts, and South Korea’s CICA Museum. A truly global artist,Niroobakhsh’s work evokes the feminine realm as she draws from the personal,mythological and cultural to originate on themes of beauty, isolation,creativity and fertility. Her current and upcoming exhibitions include the two solo exhibition Zaghareet at VarleyArt Gallery of Markham on Summer2019 and I, Saffron at Goldfarb Study Centre Gallery at York University on September 26 2019.