Photo: Lucy Bohnsack
At the centre of my practice is an exploration of human experiences that unsettle, disorient, and transform us. As a first-generation Iranian woman raised in America, I approach these themes through the lens of displacement and resilience, drawing on a rich inheritance of mysticism and storytelling. I create sculptural costumes, textile collages, paintings, and illuminated installations that reimagine the afterlives of personal and collective histories.
My work distills a life—its spirit, demons, and dreams—into a single form. Through clothing and abstraction, I build alternative architectures for memory, where identity moves fluidly between presence, transcendence, and disfiguration. Costume, for me, is not simply an expression of identity; it becomes a living presence, a vessel for transformation.
I start from an internal, intuitive place, using drawing and monotype to give shape to what is felt but not always seen. These early works allow accident and intention to meet, creating unexpected outcomes that I develop into larger pieces across painting, textiles, and sculpture. Material choices—layered fabrics, stitched surfaces, glowing elements—capture the tension between fragility and endurance that runs through all of my work.
Science fiction, surrealism, and the idea of parallel realities are deep influences. I am drawn to the spaces where past and future, visible and invisible, material and imagined collapse into one another. My practice centres the figure of the outsider: women, creators, travellers between worlds. I am fascinated by the vulnerability and agency of those who inhabit the margins—those marked as alien, yet who build new possibilities out of difference.
Through my work, I aim to create evocative, otherworldly environments that invite viewers to experience transformation—to move, even briefly, into spaces where identities are not fixed, but fluid, hybrid, and evolving.
BIO
Laleh Khorramian (b. 1974 Tehran, Iran) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and received her BFA at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and her MFA at Columbia University, New York, NY. She has presented solo presentations at The Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK; Salon 94, New York, NY; Statements, Art Basel, Switzerland; Midnight Moment, Times Square, NY, and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria. Select group exhibitions at the MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; MoMA P.S.1, NY; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Site Santa Fe Biennale, Santa Fe, NM; and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris, FR; among others. Select awards include the Vasseur Artists’ Award, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the Pat Hearn and Colin Deland Foundation Grant, The Gottlieb Foundation Grant and the Agnes Martin Award. In 2013, she created LALOON, an ongoing project of hand-painted original garments and costumes. In 2014 Include Amplified Toilet Water was published (artist book, edition of 33, Bartleby and Co. Publishers, Brussels, Belgium), housed in the collections of MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Columbia University and the Royal Library of Belgium. Khorramian lives and works in upstate NY where she is Visiting Artist in Residence at Bard College.