Vanessa Safavi

Vanessa Safavi’s early research is shaped by her multicultural background and reflects a deep engagement with questions of migration, tourism, and exoticism. Early works explored notions of otherness and alienation, often drawing on ethnographic ideas inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In installations such as sandy desert landscapes and thin metallic sculptures, she investigated cultural displacement and simplified human forms, while later taxidermied birds highlighted the artificiality of exotic stereotypes, exposing the failure of colonial utopias through subtle, evocative gestures. After this socially engaged phase, Safavi turned to the exploration of materiality, developing a language of sculpture that balances conceptual rigor with playful experimentation. Silicone, rubber, resin, and plastics become central to her work, valued for their mutability, tactility, and associations with the body, femininity, and fetishism. She combines these materials with sand, metal, shells, and wooden structures to craft sculptures that are simultaneously sensual, abstract, and narrative-driven, influenced by Lygia Clarke, Lynda Benglis, and post-minimalist geometry. Safavi’s ongoing research investigates the body, skin, and identity, linking the pliability of materials to cultural and technological transformations that shape contemporary perceptions of self. Her work reflects the fragility, vulnerability, and poetic potential of the body, offering a meditation on presence, desire, and the shifting meanings of embodiment in a hyperstructured world. ...