Team

Azar Mahmoudian

Azar Mahmoudian is a curator and educator based in Tehran. She is part of a collective that co-ran kaf, an independent space focusing on discursive and educational programs on art and theory in Tehran (2010-2015).

Azar is also a lecturer at Tehran Art University. Her research develops from her ongoing engagement with display structures and modes of the political imaginary regarding exhibiting formats, and more recently, the recycling of representational tropes in modern and contemporary art history in the Iran. This has been present through her archival research on the “first exhibition of fine art” at the Soviet House of Culture (Tehran, 1946), the "5th (Regional) Tehran Biennial" (Tehran, 1966), and a long-term project, undertaken from 2009–2011, mapping the sudden rise of survey exhibitions of Iranian art held outside Iran in the 2000s, investigating their aftermath in artistic productions and the infrastructural shifts in the country’s art scene. She has curated projects in various institutions including South Asian Visual Art Center and Blackwood Gallery, both in Toronto; School of Oriental and African Studies, London; CAB Brussels, and Cultuurcentrum, Bruges.

Azar holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was awarded the Chevening Scholarship in 2008.