Diaspora Letters

Beeta Baghoolizadeh

January 23-February 10, 2018

Diaspora Letters is Beeta Baghoolizadeh’s first solo exhibition. Baghoolizadeh uses new media to illustrate her memories and the passage of time through black and white digital illustrations and gifs that invite viewers to visualize themselves in foreign-yet-familiar spaces. 

As a historian of modern Iran, Baghoolizadeh’s work examines the past and the present, exploring banal environments that have been politicized in the current hostile political atmosphere. Her “letters” are purely visual, stripped of legibly written text to mimic the diasporic feeling of exclusion in different languages.

Beeta Baghoolizadeh is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is completing her dissertation on the history of abolition, race, and visual media in Iran. Born in Los Angeles to Iranian immigrant parents, she regularly returns to Iran to conduct research and visit family. She began drawing Diaspora Letters during her most recent trip to Isfahan and Tehran in the summer of 2017.