Bio + Statement

BIO

Zahra professionals work began in 2011 (León, SP). While she was finishing her graduate in Printing Arts and Graphic Design she joined the occupied center “La Nave”. There, she has got her first studio-space and started collecting public advertisements and experimenting on its layers as an archeological character and as a means of uncovering historical information.

In 2013, she moved to Berlin through the Erasmus European Program, working with Yorgos Sapountzis as artist assistant. Here based her atelier to continuous developing an artistic career around different geographies. This devotion to research the streets looking for advertisements has allowed to truly find her own language and growth as an artist.

Her work has been exhibited in Germany, Italy, Spain, Ecuador or France between others, as several collaborations, exhibitions and festivals. In 2018 she received the grant “Jean Jacques Rousseau” from the French Ministry of Culture at “Jardin des Lumieres” Ermenonville. In 2020 she was selected for the grant “Berliner Senat Stipendium für Kultur und Kunst” founding the latest project Light Collage.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Zahra`s work is determined by her deep interest in the Cosmos, the physics of light and the role of the feminine. She blend together in a balance, manifesting a reflection towards our place in the world and in the universe which arise from the crossroads between scientific, philosophical and poetical thought.

Assuming herself as an observer, her work is characterized by the symmetry between dream and reality.

As a narrative medium, collage brings the capacity to shape constellations with her ideas, her worlds within worlds, contemplations, questions or analyses. In a searching exercise for elevation and knowledge, of expansion in space and time, which she uses to play in compositions with balance, tension, lightness or ingravity.

Manifested through an analogic work, Zahra is constantly scanning the streets, rapping billboards and advertisements as if the city were the map of a giant-scale collage, extent as a dynamic performative principle. Recycling street posters, old books, illustrations, maps or magazines and giving them a new chance or new life, is also a way to question the system of production in the field of contemporary arts and the exclusivity of materials in a consumerist society.

Collage becomes in her hands a relativistic tool, an anarchistic discipline of disobedience to subvert axiomatic hierarchies. A political exercise to redefine reality, as a subversive strategy by the continuing searching for a deeper understanding.

Characterised by a frequent representation of women, we can read a deep analysis about the female role in mass media, and how its representations in a consumer society affects and negatively influences Self-stereotyping. She usually shows us women liberated from objectification and connected to the principles of nature as sacred living organism, but also conveys a critical message about gender identities transformed by advertising and marketing into a silent and fragmented body.

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