Artist Talk with Raheleh Filsoofi

Raheleh Filsoofi is a collector of soil and sound, an itinerant artist, a feminist curator, and a community service advocate. Her work synthesizes socio-political statements as a point of departure and further challenges these fundamental arguments by incorporating ancient and contemporary media such as ceramics, poetry, ambient sound, and video. Her interdisciplinary practices act as the interplay between the literal and figurative contexts of land, ownership, immigration, and border.

Her work has been shown individually and collaboratively in Iran and the United States. Her recent exhibitions include interactive multimedia solo exhibitions, Debated Narrative, at ENGAGE Projects in Chicago (2022), and Artifacting in Unrequired Leisure gallery in Nashville (2022), which both received reviews in Observer and Nashville Scene. She is the participant artist in the Sharjah Biennial 15, Thinking Historically in the Present, and the 2023 Tennessee Triennial. Filsoofi’s Imagined Boundaries, a multimedia installation consisting of two separate exhibitions, debuted concurrently in a solo exhibition at the Abad Gallery in Tehran and a group exhibition, Dual Frequency, at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida, in 2017. The installation connected audiences in the U.S. and Iran for a few hours on the night of the exhibition opening.

She is the 2022 winner of the 1858 Contemporary Southern Art Award and the recipient of the 2021 Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University. She holds an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Florida Atlantic University and a B.F.A. in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran.