Negar Tabibian

I am an Iranian-American artist. I paint, I perform, I photograph and I work digitally, and all of it is one attempt at the same thing: to say what is happening inside my own small world to everyone standing outside it.

A woman of a fire, and her never-ending battle to survive. She is what I find when I look back over decades of work, whatever the medium was that year. What she is surviving changes: mental health, immigration, social injustice, the political weather of a country I left and never left.

I started making this work to heal. I kept making it because of what came back: people who found themselves seen in it, and were spared having to find the words. That exchange is still the most fulfilling part of the practice, and it is why the work is here rather than in a drawer.