Centre for Print Research Artist Talks for Students

Description

Navid Azimi Sajadi

Navid Azimi Sajadi was born in Tehran, Iran, 1982. He gained a Bachelor of Art in painting from Tehran Art and Architecture University in 2005. The same year he moved to Rome. In Italy he graduated from Accademia di Belli Arti di Roma. He was awarded the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation prize in 2009. He gained his Master of Fine Art in Multimedia Sculpture in 2013 from Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, and in the same year was invited to the ninth Shanghai Biennale.

Navid’s work reviews his experience in-between two cultures, dealing with cross-cultural codes. He has developed an esoteric language of signs and symbols from multiple mythologies and histories. Navid aims to manipulate and play with the pre-prescribed meanings of images, forms and memories, creating a metaphorical landscape where viewers can attach a wide array of significance to indicators of time and space. Put simply, his work gives a visual glimpse of a crossroad where present day events meet the past and ancient cults.

His installations are based on a reading of “ambivalence” that has been transformed to become a shape that can be demystified only by taking into account one’s presuppositions – in other words, the viewer is to “read into” the work, rather than extract meaning from it in an objective manner. Each individual element is laden with meaning, coalescing to represent today’s society as Navid perceives it. His reading of “ambivalence” does not merely reflect a psychological state but aims to be an aggregation of all possible states.