Interview with Yasmin Moshari by Noah Becker

Sentimental Acrylic on Paperboard, 2020, 25.78x37.59inch

By NOAH BECKER September 6, 2025

NOAH BECKER: Your work often positions memory as a living material that shifts and reshapes through retelling. How do you know when a memory has transformed enough to become a painting?

YASMIN MOSHARI: When I work with personal memory, I know it has transformed into material for painting when it begins to reveal multiple layers, when it can be read psychoanalytically, socio-politically, or as part of a shared experience that extends beyond the purely autobiographical.

With collective memory, I’m often drawn to micro-narratives that have been overshadowed by grand historical accounts. Sometimes this means re-telling a familiar narrative in a way that highlights its overlooked, more intimate aspects. Other times, I’m fascinated by stories that exist in multiple versions, where small variations across different sources create openings for reinterpretation. Those are the moments when memory feels alive enough to be staged visually.

Living between Tehran and Vancouver means existing in two very different cultural and environmental landscapes. How has this duality shaped your sense of identity as an artist?

Living between Tehran and Vancouver places me within two very different landscapes—both environmental and cultural—which deeply shape my artistic identity. In Vancouver, where rain saturates the land, I am surrounded by lush, vibrant nature, while Tehran’s dense concrete cityscape framed by mountains evokes absence and longing. In my work, saturated landscapes often coexist with ruins, industrial fragments, or terraces that offer moments of escape from urban life.

Tehran has shaped me politically and culturally. Living in a charged environment where uprisings and state violence permeate daily life has made me acutely aware of how I navigate, and sometimes avoid, certain media or subjects, given my constant state of alertness. Even when I paint melancholic or dark subjects, I reach for sharp, vivid palettes to counterbalance the emotional weight of a subject. This approach also resonates culturally: many Iranian dance songs are written in minor keys or disguise sad lyrics beneath upbeat rhythms.

At the same time, being fluent in both Farsi and English has made me aware of how translation transforms memory and narrative. Living between these geographies creates a dual, and sometimes paradoxical, experience that finds its way into my work: contradictory images, narratives, and spaces coexisting in a single painting.

The Hero is Absent, Acrylic on Paperboard, 2020, 19.69x27.56inch

You describe stories as vessels that carry emotion, heritage, and psyche. What is a story—personal or cultural—that continues to resurface in your work?

Living in a heavily censored, almost Orwellian environment where history is constantly “updated” and daily news is retold to fit a prescribed narrative, the story that resurfaces for me isn’t a single tale. It’s the collision between personal accounts and grand narratives: official histories, art histories, even cinematic biopics. That tension is always revealing not only of the subject itself, but of the atmosphere and values of the time in which it was told. In my work, that “story” doesn’t unfold as a linear narrative but as fragments that insist on survival, even when they’re partial, damaged, or misremembered.

In your practice, do you see painting and writing as separate languages, or do they merge into one continuous form of storytelling?

For me they’re intertwined. In my writing there’s always a trace of storytelling, and in painting I work in a similar way through metaphors, juxtapositions, and images that suggest more than they state. Writing sharpens how I see. I don’t just say a room feels heavy; I describe how it smells, how the light falls, what sounds are present. That attention to detail carries into my painting, where atmosphere is built not through a single gesture but through suggestive details and sensory cues. Painting and writing form a loop for me, where each quotes and revises the other, echoing back and forth in a continuous act of storytelling.

Heritage and memory can be heavy or even painful subjects. How do you balance vulnerability with creative freedom in your work?

I treat vulnerability as an opening. Painful subjects become material for exploration, framed within surreal structures and patterned surfaces that create the distance needed to share a story without being consumed by it. My work is dominated by the process of painting and by examining how memory is formed: I often create multiple variations of the same image, revising digitally before returning to paint, producing ‘quotations’ rather than a single truth. The shifting compositions, colors, and elements in each iteration mirror the fluid, everchanging nature of memory, allowing for both play and deep exploration.

Also, by showing both painting and digital work, I explore different temporalities: contrasting the meditative time of painted memory with the improvisatory time of digital sketching. Vulnerability fuels the work, but creative freedom allows stories to transform and expand, leaving space for doubt, multiplicity, and dialogue.

Even Legends Fall Ill (According to the artist’s top student). Digital Painting, 2025.

Many of your works suggest paradoxical states—between presence and absence, shadow and revelation. What draws you to exploring these in-between spaces?

I’m drawn to thresholds, where uncertain moments create fluid meanings. Presence and absence, shadow and revelation, are not opposites for me but intertwined conditions. These paradoxes mirror how memory and experience function: it preserves while it erases, it reveals while it distorts, always in unfixed states. In painting, these in-between spaces allow me to stage tension, ambiguity, and the uncanny that cannot be fully resolved.

As both a painter and a curator, how does curating other people’s stories affect your own creative process and the narratives you choose to tell?

Curating keeps me aware of dialogue. It reminds me that storytelling is never solitary; it’s always a response. Engaging deeply with other artists’ practices helps me see my own work from unexpected vantage points.

It also changes how I think about painting itself. In this project, for example, I imagine the series of works as a single experience, almost like walking through snapshots of a film. That perspective sometimes prompts me to create a painting not just for itself, but because it needs to sit next to another, so together they create a rhythm or narrative. 

My knowledge of curating encourages me to approach painting in a more process-oriented way: to think in terms of sequences, echoes, and relationships. That’s why I often present multiple frames or variations of a single image, so memory is shown in motion rather than as something fixed. For example, I might place a heavily layered, opaque version of a painting beside a lighter iteration with a different palette or lighting, and then follow it with a digital print that reveals an intermediate stage. When installed together, these works create a collision between different visual registers. The viewer doesn’t encounter one “final” painting but an unfolding of memory as overlapping processes, always shifting and refusing resolution. WM