Panel Discussion with Once at Present Artists Shiva Ahmadi, Abbas Akhavan, Sanaz Mazinani, Taravat Talepasand, 2018–2019 Capp Street Artist-in-Residence Abbas Akhavan, moderated by Asian Art Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Programs Marc Mayer. 

Shiva Ahmadi is Associate Professor of Art at UC Davis. She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Arts in 2005, her MFA in Drawing from Wayne State University in 2003, and her BFA in Painting from Azad University in 1998. Her work explores contemporary conundrums between the historically refined aesthetics and cultural conceits of the Middle East with the violence, corruption, and uncertainties wrought not only upon local societies but the whole world by malicious, global potentates. Her work is in collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morgan Library, Asia Society Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Detroit Institute of Arts, Farjam Collection in Dubai, and the TDIC Corporate Collection in Abu Dhabi. She was awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2016, and is represented by Haines Gallery. www.shivaahmadistudio.com

Abbas Akhavan’s practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture and performance. The direction of his research has been deeply influenced by the specificity of the sites where he works: the architectures that house them, the economies that surround them, and the people that frequent them. The domestic sphere, as a forked space between hospitality and hostility, has been an ongoing area of research in his practice. More recent works have shifted focus, wandering onto spaces and species just outside the home – the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes. Akhavan is the recipient of Kunstpreis Berlin (2012), The Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014), the Sobey Art Award (2015), and the Fellbach Triennial Award (2016). He has had solo shows at The Power Plant, Toronto (2018); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2017); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017); Artspeak, Vancouver (2015); and Delfina Foundation, London (2012). His recent group exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial (2018); GAMeC, Bergamo (2018); SALT Galata, Istanbul (2017); Prospect New Orleans (2017); Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE (2017); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); 10th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2014); and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011).(www.abbasakhavan.com)

Sanaz Mazinani is based between San Francisco and Toronto. Working across the disciplines of photography, social sculpture, and large-scale multimedia installation, she creates informational objects that invite a rethinking of how we see, suspending the viewer between observation and knowledge. She holds an undergraduate degree from Ontario College of Art & Design and an MFA from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the West Vancouver Museum and in venues throughout the US as well as in Canada, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Switzerland, the UAE, and the UK. Her work has been written about in Artforum, artnet News, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, among others. She has received grants from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and her work is held in public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the San Francisco International Airport. www.sanazmazinani.com

Taravat Talepasand is an artist and educator whose interdisciplinary painting practice questions normative Western beauty, by way of politically charged images of contemporary Iranian women under the guise of traditional Persian painting. Her work expresses the role of women in the hyphenated American identity, through global feminist ideologies, Iranian political histories, and the oppression of female sexuality in Iran, and asks viewers to reconsider normative Western ideologies of her native country and citizens of the Iranian Diaspora in a myriad of ways. She is the Department Chair of Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, de Young Museum, and the Orange Country Museum of Art. She was included in Bay Area Now 8 Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, the 2010 California Biennial, and was the recipient of the 2010 Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. www.taravattalepasand.com