Born in 1972 in Tehran, Shaya Shahrestani graduated from Tehran’s Girls' Visual Arts Conservatory majoring in Painting. Later on, she received her degree from the Faculty of Arts and Architecture of the Islamic Azad University of Tehran and is currently a member of the Iranian Sculptors Association. She has had four solo exhibitions and has participated in forty group exhibitions. Her professional background is in the fields of sculpture, design and painting.

Body is to be regarded as a social and historical construct which takes on multiple and even contradictory positions in the world and in the complicated discourses. Body is somehow a narration of the history of the subject. Body narrates itself and is served an arena for the confrontation between acting agents and passive forces. In other words, body is simultaneously a product and a producer of ideology and social power. Facing with body in Shaya’s works is not a regular and everyday encounter that deals with the states of body, its changes and face makings. Instead, they go beyond this and we are even faced with the absence of the other. Here, the bodies do not exclusively represent a dialectic relation between the mind and the body. Instead, they present a knowledge and cognition towards what the body has experienced as independent from one’s self: a body that has taken on scratched lines or curves. These bodies do not bear any complexions. They have hence been emptied of any particular notions. Of course, the omission of faces does not mean that one is on the verge of acquiring a new identity.... . . Oil Pastel & Pencil on Canvas 245 x 265 cm