Mahnaz Jabri is an interdisciplinary practitioner working primarily with painting, photography, and performance. Their practice examines the emotional and perceptual disconnection of contemporary humans from time, beauty, and nature—a condition shaped by the distancing of lived experience, cultural memory, and shared roots from everyday life and collective identity. This rupture reveals a crisis of both individual and social identity, highlighting how former aesthetic values, cultural traditions, and systems of meaning are collapsing and being redefined in the contemporary world.

Through research into Iranian culture, the artist turned to poetry and calligraphy as fundamental modes for understanding the relationship between humans and the world—traditions in which language, image, and meaning exist in a living, poetic dialogue. By re-reading these traditions, particularly through the logic of siah-mashq—a practice based on repetition and the overlapping of letters—the artist seeks to recover a spiritual dimension of aesthetics that has been fading from contemporary life. In siah-mashq, writing moves beyond linguistic meaning and becomes a visual, bodily, and temporal act; legibility dissolves in favor of rhythm, movement, and pause. The artist’s calligraphic paintings similarly employ repetition not for readability, but to generate rhythm.

After more than a decade of sustained work with calligraphy and calligraphic painting, the artist’s recent practice has shifted toward drawing, photography, and the study of nature as a dynamic site of continual destruction and renewal. In these works, nature gains meaning through its relationship with poetry and identity—a space saturated with both death and life that shapes modes of perception. Plants, particularly flowers, play a central role as signs of vitality, beauty, fragility, and ecological memory. In recent works, letters and their rhythms encounter natural elements and assume new identities.

In the artist’s latest body of work, fragments of the elements that shape contemporary identity appear in disjointed and layered forms across paintings and installations. Meaning is not fixed but emerges through the viewer’s encounter, shaped by lived experience and cultural memory. Through cycles of dissolution and reconstruction, the work opens a space to reconsider contemporary identity as fluid, unstable, and continually in formation—experienced not as a fixed condition, but as an open and participatory process.

Overall, the artist’s recent works do not aim to narrate identity, but rather to create a space for pause and reflection against the accelerated, mechanized pace of contemporary life, inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between humans, nature, time, beauty, and cultural roots.