Shadi Harouni is a visual artist with a practice that ranges across modalities and media, from site-specific interventions and sculptures to film and photography. Her research focuses on marginalised and disregarded stories of dissent, especially in her ancestral Kurdistan, linking silent acts of personal resistance to global mass movements.

Harouni’s work is rooted in spaces, objects and sentient subjects imbued with utopian dreams and unfulfilled promises of exoduses and revolutions. Her photographs and films made in cemeteries, mountain quarries, time-worn dwellings and abandoned factories throughout Iranian Kurdistan look to the mountain and the monument, home and homeland as sites of remembrance and resistance, of despair and possibility.

Harouni’s art and writings have been published in Art Forum, The Guardian, The New York Times and other publications. Her projects have been exhibited at the Queens Museum (NY), Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), City Museum Prague (CZ), Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art and Asian Art Museum (IT). Furthermore, she received the Gattuso Prize, the Harpo Foundation Grant for Artists, residencies at Civitella Ranieri (IT), SOMA (MX), Fondazione Ratti (IT) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), where Harouni also served as Acting Director in 2019.