About the Lecture
In the first half of this lecture, Mirzaie will introduce his artistic research, focusing on his engagement with image-making, photographic installation, and narrative structures. He will reflect on his artistic pathway since 2008 and discuss key projects from the past seventeen years, culminating in his most recent project, Garden (2025). This project functions as an archive—and simultaneously an anti-archive—centering on individuals who have been killed, arrested, or forcibly disappeared in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He will conclude this section by sharing selected texts from the project that were published in a limited-edition booklet.
In the second half of the lecture, he will turn to his curatorial and research practice, presenting the development of the Tasvir Archive Project and its broader conceptual and historical aims. He will discuss the work accomplished since its founding in 2022, including the curated exhibitions presented in September 2025, as well as the initiative’s future directions and its significance within broader conversations on archiving, history, and contemporary image-based art in Iran and beyond.
Mehrdad Mirzaie is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist, curator, and educator based in Phoenix, Arizona. His practice centers on the afterlives of images, the politics of seeing, and the relationship between collective memory and historical imagery—particularly within regions marked by censorship, state violence, and the erasure of collective histories. Working with photography, archives, and alternative image-making processes, he investigates how visual histories are preserved, reinterpreted, or lost, emphasizing the complex dialectical relationship between past and contemporary time and sociopolitical contexts.
Mirzaie’s academic research extends to the history and philosophy of photography, examining images as conduits for historical narratives, political memory, and acts of storytelling. He currently serves as an Assistant Curator and Collection Assistant at Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University, deepening his experience in curatorial practice, archival studies, and image-based art. He received his MFA from Arizona State University in 2025 and is now pursuing an MA in Art History at ASU, with a research focus on Iranian image-based art and its broader connections to global art.
He is also the founder of the Tasvir Archive Project (established in December 2022), a research initiative dedicated to documenting and archiving Iranian image-based art and visual culture.
He is also the founder of the Tasvir Archive Project (established in December 2022), a research initiative dedicated to documenting and archiving Iranian image-based art and visual culture.