Azin Yousefiani

Azin Yousefiani is a multifaceted artist practicing with many mediums including collage, sketching, painting, digital work, and silkscreen printmaking. In recent years, she has been using the medium of fabric, paper, and cardboard in order to create colourful collages inspired by her hometown and childhood. Yousefiani also often uses her work to represent the deconstruction of social ethnic identity. This manipulates an accepted idea or concept in order to challenge and reproduce new meanings of identity and cultural/social beliefs of her society.

In 2014, she produced a collection of collages in ode to her childhood using fabric from her old clothes, yarn stitching, acrylic colours, and buttons, sewing them together piece by piece in order to express nostalgia. This is particularly shown through the intentionally erratic stitchwork that imitates that of a child. 

This exploration of her childhood is expanded in her collection ‘Dancing on the Dust’ (2016) which showcases the use of assemblage and collage creating plate-like objects. These are made using papier mache, collected cardboard and rubbish and discarded Kurdish fabric found in her hometown Sarandaj, Iran. For these creations Yousefiani took inspiration from the traditional Japanese worldview, Wabi-Sabi (侘寂), which describes beauty as an impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete object. Characteristics of the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes. For example, this collection ties together the fabric of ceremonial Kurdish dresses with rubbish like teabag tissues to create a work that gives new meaning to beauty and cultural beliefs.