BasketShop Gallery is proud to present new work by Nazanin Najdmofarrah, an extraordinary artist and researcher whose practice profoundly engages with social, cultural, and conceptual questions surrounding memory, trauma, and collective consciousness.

Blending historical narratives, participatory methods, and immersive installations, Najdmofarrah’s work transforms ordinary materials into poignant vessels of testimony. Her current project, Embedded Histories (2025), draws on the concept of defamiliarization, a literary and artistic technique introduced by Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky. By embedding everyday objects—children’s shoes, dishes, toys—into austere concrete forms, she renders them strange and unfamiliar. This disruption invites viewers to slow down, examine, and emotionally engage with the ruptured meanings of these objects.

“Memories are hidden in objects,” Najdmofarrah writes. “They contain forgotten histories that my work seeks to uncover and make visible.” Her materials—delicate yet trapped, intimate yet anonymized—reflect her ongoing inquiry into how objects and space record and reproduce political violence, particularly in the context of her upbringing in Iran. The result is a body of work that resists passive viewing and insists on confrontation with the histories we bury and the silences we inherit.

Originally from Iran, Najdmofarrah holds an MFA from the University of Cincinnati and was awarded the 2024 IRiS Graduate Research Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where she also led a public artist talk. Drawing influence from artists such as Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, and Mona Hatoum, she merges materiality and spatial intervention to challenge dominant narratives and offer space for reflection and resistance. She will begin her PhD in Art Education at The Ohio State University in Fall 2025.