Koushna Navabi was born in Tehran, left Iran in 1979 and lived for fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in London. She completed her MA in Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College in 1995 and has exhibited in the UK and internationally.

Navabi’s work has focused on aspects of the complex relationships between the West and the Middle East and between craft and art. Knitting and embroidery feature in much of her work, often depicting historical images and traditional Persian motifs combined with scientific notation.
The cross-stitch pieces depict newspaper photographs of Iranian political events. These works conjure the memories of childhood and create an evocative space in which to consider the politics of exile in the context of pattern, craft and beauty, shame and the conventions of men and women’s work.

The carpet bears an untraditional motif. The deceptively decorative pattern illustrates a geophysical view of an area of the Persian Gulf sea floor. Navabi worked with a geophysicist to represent the details of a graph used to locate, drill and extract the oil that has been at the heart of the relationship between the Middle East and the West for the past century. The carpet was produced in collaboration with the Institute of Weaving in Tehran using traditional methods.

Since 1996, Navabi has been making oil paintings depicting the knitted surface and using the language of painting to expose the aesthetic and gender politics implied in the distinctions between art and craft. In this work, the traditional motif of birds and flowers appears to be represented in knit but as the viewer approaches, the artifice that has produced this illusion of craft become apparent.

You're So Iranian (Female Erectile Tissue) explores the fundamental oppositions of interior and exterior, public and private, functional and ornamental. It takes intimate, hidden female organs and renders them triply estranged by making them visible, by transforming them into sculptural and public objects and by putting them into a surreal but personal context evoked by the use of a traditional and domestic Persian-patterned fabric.

The ‘Crude Oil Molecule’ series depicts an unsettling combination of beautifully embroidered and apparently three-dimensional ball-and-stick models of the structure of hydrocarbons that drift over the surface of a 19th framed century Persian textile motif. The works are the most overtly political of Navabi’s work to date while still exploring the themes characteristic of her work including the
paradoxes around art and craft, female and male work and the domestic and public.

1962             
Born, Tehran, Iran, August 22
1995             
M.A. Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
1994             
Postgraduate Diploma, Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Eehibition
2009            
 Solo Exhibition, Xerxes Fine Arts, London
2008             
Xerxes at TIAF   
Xerxes at ACAF NY
The Iranians I, Contrasts Gallery, Shanghai
Contrasts Gallery at ArtDubai
2006             
Group Show,    Hiroshima Art Document 2006
1999             
Frankfurt Art Fair
1998             
Group Show, Home, London
1997 - 1998   
Craft, University of Wales, Vardy Gallery,
1997 - 1998   
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge   
Strangely Familiar, Ikon Gallery
1996 -1997   
The Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery
1995            
Goldsmith’s College Group Show   
Chisenhale Gallery

Selected Press Release
Independent on Sunday, March 11, 2001
Artists Newsletter, March 2001
Evening Standard, February 6, 2001
Craft, January/February 2001                                                
Art Review, February 1999
Time Out, Decemebr 4, 1998   
Art Monthly, December 1997
Time Out, October 22, 1997