Bita Fayyazi

Bita Fayyazi (b. 1962, Tehran) lives and works in Tehran. More than a sculptor, an installation artist, or a ceramicist, engaged in some mystic relationship with her material, Fayyazi is an artist who works within a more performative and markedly social practice.

Bita Fayyazi struggled to show her work in an atmosphere of stuffy traditionalism, academicism, and the influx of 1990s conceptual art.
Beginning in mid-1990s, her artistic interventions challenged the official definitions of art. Works of Fayyazi are collaborative by nature.
Bita and her artist or non-artist colleagues use whatever material is readily available to wrap, entwine, paint, and cast sculptures made of the fabric of social participation. She reconstitutes the energies of the many toward an uncertain resolution. The final object becomes less important than the process – the collective doing, the love of doing – that preceded its creation.

In addition to bringing her work to the streets and abandoned buildings of Tehran, Bita Fayyazi has presented prominent installations and performances internationally. She successfully entered 2000 pieces of ceramic "Cockroaches" into the 6th Biennial of Contemporary Ceramic Art (1998, Tehran, Iran). She cast and fired terracotta dogs ("Road Kill", 1998), modelled on dead dogs found on the highways of Tehran, and then placed her works on the streets around the city, much to the consternation of viewers. She participated in the Iranian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005, Venice, Italy). She has exhibited at La Maison Rouge (Paris, 2016), Espace Louis Vuitton (2008 and 2010, Paris, France), the Museum of Modern Art (2007, Freiburg) and the Pergamon Museum (2008, Berlin) among others.