Arezoo Bharthania

Bio

Arezoo Bharthania is an interdisciplinary Los Angeles based artist. She earned her MFA from CSU Long Beach and her MA from CSU Northridge. Bharthania has exhibited in venues around the world. She is the recipient of the Museum Manager Award, Lancaster Museum of Art: CEDAR and COTA Dean purchase award, Kleefeld Museum, Long Beach. 

Artist Statement

My work reflects the experience of creating a home while existing in a state of in-between. It is a narrative formed through layers and gestures that blend my childhood and early adulthood in Iran with my current life in Los Angeles. The space I occupy is navigated through the bodily experience of womanhood and a balance of dichotomies: public and private, psychological and physical environments, here and there. Constructing a home within this space, making connections to build anchors within the disconnect and displacement of diaspora fuel my artistic explorations

The homes that I have inhabited across geographies represent a multilayered construction of identity influenced by interdependent forces that define roles, govern behaviors, and order power relationships. The Iranian identity I carry in the United States relies heavily on my history as an immigrant. Utilizing my personal history as a filter, my work honors the common experiences and materials of everyday life from which people build a home. This includes personal human experiences of love, work, observation, memory, emotion, sensation, nostalgia and desire; and the universal struggle to pull forth vivid memories that have been reduced to flashing glimpses as time creates distance between past experience and current life.

I make mixed-media work to communicate, mutate, and abstract layers of memory along with elements of the home with the knowledge that both are inextricable from political and social contexts.