Growing up in the north of Iran, near the Caspian Sea, Atefeh Farajolahzadeh was deeply inspired by her family’s passion for Persian literature and poetry. She dreamt of studying creative writing. As a youth, she belonged to a weekly gathering of young writers where they would read and discuss their writings. She published her first short story in Golestaneh, a prestigious literary magazine in Iran that is no longer in publication.
Atefeh also studied the visual arts, and they had a strong hold on her imagination, even though she majored in science and mathematics while matriculating at The University of Mazandaran. In 2014, when she emigrated to the United States at 27, she began to focus on photography as she continued to consider what she wanted to do for her career.
“It is common for those who become invested in the medium to start it with film photography, but I began making images digitally, and then I moved into shooting film and doing analog photography,” she says. “So, I guess I had a reverse journey.”
Atefeh’s earliest images were mainly of people, including all of the new friends she was making among the community of Iranian students living in a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She regularly received compliments about the quality of her pictures.
“I felt that my life was changing,” Atefeh recalls. “I was in the beginning of a journey and trying to figure out my existence in this new country.”
The images became increasingly complex and revealing of the shared immigrant experience of the Iranian students.
“I wanted to capture my friends in a lonely moment, in their solitude,” she explains. “It was a tool to mirror the experience they had that was very similar to the experience I was having. Later my image-making style changed from my early works as I began my graduate studies.”
A couple of years later, Atefeh submitted those images as part of her portfolio with her application for graduate school at Columbia College Chicago. She enrolled at the school in the fall of 2017 and graduated in December 2019.
“What distinguishes Ati is the poetic sensibility that she brings to the work,” says Paul D’Amato, professor, Columbia College Chicago. “She’s able to express that elusive thing, that poetic sensibility in her photography and videos in English, and that really is impressive. It took her a while, but she stuck to her guns, and she’s really smart, and she‘s a really generous person in the way she treats others and that was reciprocated, so she can do a lot of things. She’s pretty determined.”
All these years later, creative writing remains an important component of Atefeh’s art. “I employ text frequently in my video work,” she says. “Writing gives me a creative space to serve as a bridge between still images and moving images.”
Today, Atefeh employs photography, video, and installations in her practice. Her current works explore the idea of being elsewhere and the psychology of being in-between. Her work is driven by personal experiences as an immigrant, facing the state of suspension between her current home and her country of origin and through abstraction and representation, fiction and nonfiction. (To see more of her work, visit https://www.atefehfar.com.)
“I want the view to feel the uncertainty of being in-between through the lens of migration,” Atefeh says of her work. “But I also want the viewer to experience being in a stage of uncertainty, searching for a place to belong and feeling ungrounded in a way that resonates with their own experiences. Many of us might feel that we are passengers in the world and are trying to find our place where we are grounded, we are home, and I’m not talking about a physical home but a mental or psychological home.”
Her work was shown in SPACES, Cleveland; Hyde Park Art Center’s biennial exhibition, Chicago; Ohio University Art Gallery; Akron Soul Train residency. Currently, she teaches an asynchronous online course as an adjunct professor in the Department of Film & Media Arts at Tri-C. In August, Atefeh was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor, Photography at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University Bloomington.
“I really didn’t expect it, but I felt so honored and humbled for getting this award,” relates the young artist about winning her Cleveland Arts Prize. “It is such a strong motivation for me to continue making art and experimenting with different approaches. It is very encouraging to know that my work has been seen.”