Nazanin Hafez

The Mountains Witness, the Stones Remember, 2024
Three digital photographs on fleece
200 x 133 cm

Captured by a Green Light, 2025
26 x 60,5 cm

Before the Sunrise, at the Station, 2025
28 x 33,5 cm

After the Picnic Lunch, 2025
50 x 48 cm

The Scaffold Touched the Sky, 2025
45 x 35 cm

Praying mantis, 2025
32 x 50 cm

The Unusual is happening, 2025
33,5 x 41 cm

Behind the Wall, They Witness the rise, 2024
60 x 48 cm

C-print on 120g paper, mounted on Hahnemühle 300g paper

Mourning Women, 2024
46 x 41 cm
C-print on 120g paper, mounted on 1.4 mm cardboard

Eight analogue photo collages from the series Spectators

Courtesy the artist

Nazanin Hafez (b. 1991, Shiraz, Iran) engages in her work with the personal experience of political oppression under the Iranian regime. She examines the relationship between image and repression, representation and censorship, visibility and concealment. Using both digital and analogue photography, film, and collage, she creates resistant counter-images.

For her collage series Spectators, Hafez explores the websites of Iranian and international press agencies. She collects images of public executions and responds to them through her artistic interventions. The urban architectures—sites of daily state violence—are distorted using paper collage techniques. Hafez appropriates these found materials, but extracts fragments, reshaping them into new, dystopian visions of urban agglomerations from which the human presence has been deliberately removed.

For the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the artist has created a second series entitled The Mountains Witness, the Stones Remember. Hafez produced this body of work during her most recent visit to Iran. The photographs were taken far from the city, which remains visible in the background. These are places where young people—particularly young women—go to experience brief moments of freedom. In breathtaking mountain landscapes, women appear with uncovered hair, striking mythic poses. The mountains have always been places of refuge and resistance—offering both escape and shelter through the terrain itself.

Nazanin Hafez has interwoven these two contrasting realities of contemporary Iran into a single spatial installation. The collages—constructed from fragments of state-controlled public imagery—demand close inspection. Behind walls, in a separate room, she presents large-format portraits of unveiled women. Entering the space requires physical submission and marks the threshold into another sphere—one that is freer, almost epic in its atmosphere.

This entrance takes the form of an urban element that carries deep political significance in Iran. Since the street protests of 2017, electricity boxes have become symbols of young women’s resistance. They stood on them like pedestals, holding their hijabs aloft like flags, giving form to their rage. The regime responded swiftly, modifying the boxes with slanted metal spikes. This altered form became a symbol in itself.

Hafez has chosen a bold stance. The collages produced for this exhibition test the limits of visual representation of state violence and the threat posed to public expression through art. Her portraits restore dignity and strength to the women depicted—refusing any gesture of submission or victimhood.

 

 

Nazanin Hafez (b. 1991, Shiraz, IR) is a visual artist living in both Iran and Germany. In 2024, she completed her diploma in Fine Arts at the Mainz Academy of Fine Arts (DE), where she is currently pursuing her master’s degree under Prof. Judith Samen. Previously, she earned her bachelor’s degree in Media Art and Design in 2022 at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken (DE). In her artistic work, Hafez critically engages with social and political injustices, particularly the effects of the repressive regime in Iran. In doing so, she employs various media, ranging from photography and collage to video and installation.

Hafez has exhibited her work at several renowned institutions, including HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts, Dresden (DE), the Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Montée du Château Clervaux, Luxembourg (LU), the Modern Gallery of the Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken (DE), and the Museumsquartier Osnabrück (DE). She has received several international scholarships and awards, including the Wüstenrot Foundation Fellowship for Documentary Photography, the Hellerau Dresden Residency Award, the City of Saarbrücken Grant for Emerging Artists, and the Prix de la Photographie Clervaux Luxembourg.