This is Yasaman Falahati

I am an Iranian interdisciplinary artist, practice-led researcher, and educator based in Toronto, Canada. Working across installation, performance, painting, sculpture, sound, writing, animation, and mixed media, I use visual art as a form of witnessing: a way to translate memory, homeland, displacement, and lived Iranian experience into public space.

Born and raised in Iran, I grew up understanding art as both shelter and speech. Poetry, music, craft, storytelling, and acts of care were never separate from daily life; they were ways of preserving memory, expressing grief, creating beauty, and continuing when direct speech was not always possible. My work begins from that inheritance and continues in diaspora, where distance from home creates both sorrow and responsibility.

Through embodied and practice-led research, I explore how political systems, displacement, gendered expectations, censorship, and collective memory shape lived experience. I often return to private Iranian gestures such as carpet weaving, embroidery, lullabies, calligraphy, poetry, repetition, and handmade acts of care, then move them into public galleries and contemporary art contexts. Using my own body, labor, language, and materials found in Canada, I create works that hold the tension between visibility and erasure, tenderness and violence, home and exile.

My Practice examines how culturally specific memories can remain true to their origin while still being emotionally accessible to audiences outside that context. I am interested in dual legibility: work that feels familiar to Iranian viewers without fully explaining itself for others, while still offering a human point of entry through slowness, repetition, vulnerability, and care.

I do not approach my practice as speaking for Iranian people. I position myself as a witness, storyteller, and mediator: someone using the universal language of art to amplify, rather than replace, the voices and realities that shape the work. In many of my projects, audience contributions have entered the work voluntarily and unexpectedly, becoming part of a larger ethical archive of grief, memory, and resilience.

My work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, I hold an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media & Design from OCAD University, with academic backgrounds in Art History & Studio Art, English & Cultural Studies, and Architectural Engineering.

May my hands inscribe a role, however small, that gives this silent pain a chance to speak.