About

Bio (short version):

Aria Farajnezhad is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans installations, video essays, performative gestures, and dialogue-based formats. His practice explores infrastructures of violence, state-sanctioned narratives embedded in built environments, and the over-representation of Man-as-Human. He is currently a fellow of Villa Minimo (Kunstverein Hannover), with previous residencies and fellowships including Kulturakademie Tarabya, HIAP, AIR InSilo, WHW Akademija, and Ashkal Alwan. His recent projects include the Mosaic Speaking series, which departs from Bremen’s colonial public imagery to forge trans-regional dialogues on histories of erasure and representation, and a joint lecture-performance on Germany’s complicity in the Armenian Genocide through the Baghdad Railway, created in collaboration with Larissa Araz.

Bio (full version):

Aria Farajnezhad is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in engineering and a long-standing engagement with rhythm and percussion. He is a sound and image examiner whose work spans installations, video essays, performative gestures, and dialogue-based formats, often leaning towards speculative forensics. His practice investigates infrastructures of violence and state-sanctioned narratives embedded in built environments, while critically engaging with the over-representation of Man-as-Human, as theorized by Sylvia Wynter.

Farajnezhad is currently a fellow of Villa Minimo, the artist fellowship program of Kunstverein Hannover (2025/26). Previous residencies and fellowships include Kulturakademie Tarabya (Istanbul, 2025), HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme (Helsinki/Turku, 2024), AIR InSilo (Hollabrunn/Vienna, 2023), WHW Akademija (Zagreb, 2023), and Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (Beirut, 2018/19). Between 2020–2022, he co-ran the project space Circa 106 (Bremen) and co-initiated the Future Archives project series (Worpswede / Saarbrücken / Bitterfeld / Bremen). He holds a Diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Bremen, where he completed the Meisterschüler*innen program in 2022.

Earlier works include Toppled from the Horizontal Axis (2022, Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen) and Listening to the Rainbirds (2021, BLG Forum, Bremen) — both long-form, research-based sound and video installations employing essayistic writing, editing, and poetry across multiple mediums, from film and publication to sculpture.

Since 2023, he has pursued the ongoing project Beyond Undoing A Rediscovery, which departs from the Brinkmann-Mosaik — a white supremacist and colonial mural at Bremen’s central station — to investigate the politics of over-, under-, and non-representation in public space. The project connects these investigations to other contexts through situated dialogues and performative gestures. Through collective settings, acts of overwriting, carrying, and placing mosaic fragments in resonant public locations, the series — including Mosaic Speaking I (2023) and Mosaic Speaking II (2025) — continues to open these sites to critical and ecumenical re-readings of the notion of humanity.

In May 2024, Farajnezhad co-published the newspaper Probe-1 with GAK Bremen and co-edited a lecture-performance at the University of Liverpool with Azadeh Sarjoughian, focusing on artistic methodologies and the notion of the living archive.

Research into Germany’s complicity in the Armenian Genocide through the Baghdad Railway culminated in a joint lecture-performance with Larissa Araz, first presented in Istanbul in May 2025.

Contact: aria.farajnejad@gmail.com