Zoha Zokaei
6 – 31 March 2011
12 noon – 9pm
Riverside Gallery
My recent body of work explores the difficult but topical subject of violence against women in more traditional societies and communities. The work is not only trying to raise awareness of the act of violence, but also explores the role that the social and cultural plays in the violence. As a result the victims are re-victimized or in some situations made out to be the perpetrators.

Biography

Zoha was born in 1982 in Tehran-Iran. After finishing her BSc degree in Textiles Engineering at Amir Kabir University of Tehran, she moved to the UK in 2004. Later in 2007 she graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London with a MFA in Fine Art Practice and she has been practicing as a visual artist ever since. During the past few years she had the opportunity to take part in exhibitions nationally and internationally.

Her practice as an artist has been greatly influenced by living between Iran and the UK, resulting in her work expressing  the tensions and conflicts of living interstitially.

As a child of the Iranian Revolution she was taught to be a part of the “sacred” gender of woman guarding their bodies from the gazes of “immorality”, which has resulted in a strong awareness of the physical body. 
As an artist living in the UK she is  both fascinated and perturbed by the scale of alienation experienced in our everyday lives. Her work is an amalgamation of the “sacred” body of her childhood, and the “lost” body of her adulthood.

She does not limit her practice to a specific medium, but rather challenges her practice by exploring new media and various forms of expression from installation, photography to video and sound pieces.