Azadeh Tajpour is a multidisciplinary, research-based artist and archivist, born in Tehran and based in Boston. Her work interrogates colonial frameworks and cultural constructions of otherness through immersive multimedia installations that weave archival and found imagery to explore how histories are mediated and framed.
Her research focuses on the portrayal of Iranian women in early photography, critically examining the orientalist and colonial perspectives embedded in the photographic practices of the time. Drawing on her archival work with the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran archive at Harvard University, she examines orientalist and colonial representations of Iranian women, particularly in 19th- and early 20th-century photography. The research informs her broader exploration of how we receive and perceive information, particularly the lenses through which we view "the other." Her projects also engage with broader themes such as the embodied dehumanization of detainees by occupying forces in Iraq and Palestine, the fragmented narratives in citizen journalists’ videos of protests in Iran, and the juxtaposition of arbitrariness and violence inherent in borders. These works reflect the fragmentation of assumed realities and the layers of mediation through which we experience events happening “elsewhere.”
Tajpour's studio practice involves creating immersive multimedia installations that incorporate archival and found images, spanning subjects such as the treatment of detainees by occupying forces in Iraq and Palestine, citizen journalists' videos of protests in Iran, and personal footage of an encounter with a border patrol officer at the U.S.-Canada border. These works reflect the fragmentation of our assumed realities and the layers of mediation through which we experience events happening “elsewhere,” showcasing our positionality as observers whose perceptions of reality are often distorted or erased.
She is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the MacDowell Fellowship, Mass Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship, MASS MoCA, Boston Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Virginia and France). Tajpour co-curated Gender Politics in Iran and The Last Forty Years: Eleven Stories in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (2020). Her documentary Gazing through a Lens—Ali Khan Documents 19th-Century Iran was screened at the Harvard Art Museums and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT.
While at MacDowell with her collective Hamdel Futurist Collaborative, Tajpour worked on the project “Embodied Resistance in the Digital Age” developing a series of immersive installations in both physical and virtual spaces. Centering the body as both a site of oppression and defiance, the project draws from the open-access “Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) Archive”—a living repertoire of daily acts of resistance and creative disobedience in Iran since September 2022. The project seeks to transform the WLF archive into a dynamic, participatory tool for the global intersectional feminist movement.
Portrait by Melissa Blackall
