Laleh Mehran

For over two decades, Laleh Mehran has been creating elaborate environments in digital and physical spaces. Focused on multifaceted intersections between politics, religion, and science, Mehran strives to call attention to the implicit connections between them, while raising the question of the viewer’s relation to each of these fundamental systems. Meditative rather than didactic, Mehran’s artworks are invitations to think again about each of these paradigms and the profound connections that bind them and as such her work is of necessity as veiled as it is explicit, as personal as it is political and as critical as it is tolerant.

Mehran was born in Iran and relocated with her family to the United States at the start of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Mehran’s creative practice is inspired by both Eastern and Western philosophical understandings and aesthetic sensibilities, where art and design are merged with digital technologies and physical materials. As a result, the artworks are a hybrid which acknowledges the distinct elements, creating an interplay of the philosophical as well as the digital and the physical to construct new spaces for critical thought, dialogue, and aesthetics. Her process often incorporates interdisciplinary research, intensive fabrication, use of new practices, time-based media, and performative elements. Working in a variety of modes (solo, collaborative, collective) and in a range of different media, Mehran’s work strives to achieve a relationship between process, form, and content, such that at no time does the process and medium become mere vehicles for the meaning of the work. By creating these types of environments and experiences where the viewer plays an active role, Mehran attempts to intervene in their personal realities, disrupt ideologies, and ask them to evaluate the relationships between ideologies and their consequences.

Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been shown individually and collaboratively in the USA and international venues including the ISEA (United Arab Emirates), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), FILE (Brazil), ACT Festival (South Korea), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Massachusetts), Mattress Factory Museum (Pennsylvania), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pennsylvania), Vanderbilt University (Tennessee), The Georgia Museum of Art (Georgia), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pennsylvania), Denver Art Museum (Colorado), Biennial of the Americas at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Colorado), 404 International Festival of Art & Technology (Argentina), Next 5 Minutes 4 Tactical Media Festival (Netherlands), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), Tennessee Triennial (Tennessee), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Currents: The Santa Fe International New Media Festival (New Mexico), the Pittsburgh Biennial (Pennsylvania), and the Daniels & Fisher Clock Tower (Colorado). Mehran is a Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver.