Niloofar Rahnama (Iran)

I was born in an old district of Tehran in the winter of 1976. Having two working parents, my childhood was mostly spent on solitary games and daydreaming, creating an imaginary picture of my mother, to whom I felt an endless love, and roaming around my little sister. Love, light, and labor have been the main pillars of my family beliefs. I was yet three when the streets of Tehran were heaped by the clenched fists of the revolutionists, and soon arrived the freedom my father's generation were longing for. By the age of 11 and under the nightly terrifying bombardments we struggled to survive in the pitch black basement. The lights and shadows reflected on my mother's agitated face. While at school, covering my femininity and hiding the feeling of being a woman was always among the most indispensable principles. Meanwhile, my parents were trying their best to create an opening to the outer world and its hidden realities since beyond the closed school gates in Iran we were not able to realize them on our own. One of these realities was art. I heard my dad say how music had been silenced and mother did everything in her power to open the windows of art of front for me.   After graduating from university and stepping into professional world of art, my mother gradually left us suffering from an illness. My sister left Iran never accepting the local tensions over freedom of thought. In the meantime, painting became the only lever for me to dominate my surrounding world as well as an excuse by which I could wipe the dust of loneliness from the face of time.
I was experiencing the denial of what I had passed through my life in my works. Initially, the forms in my works were all fragmented and suspended in the space in a sort of perplexity and oblivion. In my recent works a major part of such dispersion was removed and covered underneath diluted layers of paint. 
I am interested in creating form without representing a particular color, just like weightless rocks which have been polished by time. Parts of my paintings are influenced by music which, in my opinion, is more terrestrial than painting. Through music, I try to find an opening toward the unknown, differences which I cannot find in the real world. Music helps me imagine and contemplate life.