Parya Vatankhah

About

Parya Vatankhah is a French-Iranian multidisciplinary visual artist whose work explores exile, memory, the body, and political resistance. Through photography, performance, video, and installation, she creates powerful visual narratives that question identity, freedom, and the resilience of women facing oppression.

Statement

Franco-Iranian visual artist born in Tehran, I grew up in a context deeply marked by censorship permeating cultural and artistic spheres. From an early age, I was confronted, as an artist, with political restrictions as well as with the forms of resistance, courage, and resilience they generate. Now based in Paris, France, where I continue my path as a multidisciplinary artist-researcher, my work has developed within a space freed from such censorship. My practice is rooted both in my personal history and in the collective memory of Iran, while engaging with broader contemporary issues that extend beyond this context. Through photography, video, performance, and painting, I explore the tensions between the intimate and the political, femininity and taboo, identity and exile, as well as the complex relationships between memory and forgetting. Each medium responds to an inner necessity: painting emerges from contemplation, while performance arises from the urgency of the gesture. Video and photography extend the real and the living, becoming a sensitive threshold through which I fully enter my work. The body occupies a central place in my artistic research, often my own body, used as a space of inscription, resistance, and narration. The naked body, the wounded body, the wrapped body, or the disappearing body becomes at once witness, territory, and language. Sensitive to nature, animal well-being, and our relationship with the living world, I also explore in some projects the fragile beauty of nature while revealing the imbalances caused by human activity. I conceive my work as a voice and a space of paradox where fragility and power, darkness and light coexist, sustained by a persistent vital force. Biographie : Parya Vatankhah is a Franco-Iranian multidisciplinary visual artist and art researcher based in Paris. Born in Tehran, she left Iran in 2010 to settle in France, where she developed an engaged artistic practice shaped by questions of exile, memory, and freedom of expression. She holds a PhD in Aesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of the Arts devoted to the political art of Iranian women artists in exile. She also conducted postdoctoral research at Université Paris 8 (2024–2025) on the impact of exile and displacement on the visual language of Iranian artists. In 2024, she was co-recipient of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Prize for the project Exil.s, guerre.s et création.s, developed within the research group Art, Exile and Media (IRCAV) at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her work, which spans multiple media — photography, performance, painting, installation, and video — explores the tensions between the intimate and the political, as well as the relationships between individual and collective memory. The body occupies a central place in her practice, conceived as a space of inscription, resistance, and narration. Her works have been presented in several exhibitions and festivals in France and internationally, notably at La Fab (Fondation agnès b.) in Paris, in Bordeaux as part of the exhibition Rébellion, at the RMN–Grand Palais, and in the exhibition Nishchte Was Not a Man, presented at the Malmö Art Center (Sweden) and the Arad Art Museum (Romania). Her work has also been shown in festivals such as Instants Vidéo in Marseille and Travers Vidéo in Toulouse. She has received several international distinctions, including a nomination for the AICA France Art Criticism Prize (2023), as well as awards from Women’s Voices Now (USA) and the London Feminism Short Film Award.

Education

• 2023PHD , Paris 8 university , Saint-Denis

Exhibitions

Recognition