BIO
Naghmeh Sharifi is an Iranian / Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal since 2009. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and one in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. In 2018 Sharifi completed her MFA degree at Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited in Iran, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, United States, Canada and Macedonia. In Montréal, she has presented her work at Conseils des arts de Montréal (2015), Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (2017), the MAI (2018) and the Phi Centre (2020) among other sites. Sharifi was the recipient of the Impressions Residency grant at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Phi Centre's Parallel Lines Residency and the RBC Maison d'Ariane residency. Formally trained as a painter, in recent years Sharifi's choice of medium has expanded in response to her transforming subject matters to include, print, photo and time-based media.
STATEMENT
My multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, installation, photography and time-based media, exploring the body as both a site and carrier of memory—personal, cultural, and ancestral. I am drawn to the thresholds between presence and absence, reality and imagination, and how identity is shaped, obscured, or transformed across time, space, and language.
Working across mediums, I use techniques of layering, un-painting, and erasure as ways of thinking through fragmentation—both in memory and in form. These gestures allow me to explore the emotional texture of diasporic experience: what is remembered, what is inherited, and what resists translation.
Influenced by oral traditions, folklore, and the domestic rituals of storytelling—particularly those passed down through women—I consider how knowledge and resistance take on poetic forms when formal archives are absent. My practice often engages with the fantastical not as escape, but as a mode of reimagining, of restoring presence to what history may overlook.
At its core, my work reflects on the complexities of visibility, asking how we locate ourselves—and each other—across geographies and generations, where imagination itself becomes a tool for survival, continuity, and self-making.