Leila Pazooki

Leila Pazooki was born in 1977 in Iran. She studied painting at the National Art Academy in Tehran following the Islamic Revolution, and continued her education at The Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. After a stint in Mexico, Pazooki currently resides in Berlin, where she is pursing a Master’s Degree at the Berlin University of Arts.

Pazooki’s work is primarily an inquiry into the concept of borders, and the manner in which information, language, visual vernacular, and cultural associations are contorted, and conflated, as they cross physical and imaged boundaries. Borders establish limitations that her work—often consisting of layered ‘forbidden’ images manipulated to veil their illicit content—bring to question the notion and validity of acceptability. As such, Pazooki’s multi-layered works serve to dissolve the distinction between what is tolerable and what is taboo. More recently, Pazooki’s exploration of borders has brought her to consider media and the perceptions, paradigms, cognitive processes, and associated relationships that it stimulates and maintains. Deeply cosmopolitan, her works can be read as visual material aiding in the fight against the hegemony of borders that stratify the world by way of political and canonical prejudices.

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