Born in Tehran in 1982, Shirin Salehi is a visual artist, art educator and translator living in Madrid. With an interdisciplinary oeuvre that explores media such as printmaking, drawing, sculpture and video, Shirin Salehi investigates the poetic dimension of language based on ideas such as illegible writing, erased matter, and hiddenness in images. Trained in the field of graphics, her work is concerned with the nuances of time and imprint, exploring both within language itself. Taking great care in the formal resolution of the works, she pays special attention to the conceptual qualities of the materials, constructing a body of work where contention and austerity present the tempo that interests her in order to open subtle conversations with the viewer.
She teaches regularly at the Center for Book Arts (New York City) where she has designed artist’s book critical development workshops open to artists, poets, thinkers, and all creative individuals interested in critique and theoretical discussions related to book arts and to artworks with a specific emphasis on bookness. Additionally, she teaches poetic reasoning in the Visual Narrative and Photography Editing course at LENS School of Visual Arts (Madrid, ES) since 2021. She has participated as lecturer in conferences and seminars at the Museum of Málaga, the Prado Museum, and the Reina Sofía Museum.
Her work has received several awards, including the first prize of the Ankaria Foundation for Artist’s Books (Madrid, 2015), the Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby’s Biennial Award for Artistic Creation in 2019 (a co-creation project with artist Inma Herrera), among others. In 2022, she was nominated for The Queen Sonja Print Award in Norway.
She has been an artist in residence at the Academy of Spain in Rome (2021), the Academy of France (Casa de Velázquez) in Madrid (2014), and Fondazione Il Bisonte in Florence (2016).
In her commitment to social issues, she combines her artistic practice and teaching with the work of interpreter and mediator for Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers and refugees since 2020.
