Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1970 Ahwaz, Iran

Year of Migration to the UK: 1986

Biography

Artist Reza Aramesh was born in Ahwaz in Iran in 1970, and grew up non-religious. Aramesh immigrated to London, England when he was 16 years old, following his desire to live in a multicultural city. Referring to his background, he has stated: ‘Growing up in the south of Iran, we didn’t have access to museums, and there were no museums or art galleries in the city where I lived. However, there was an amazing secondhand bookshop near my school, which had lots of books containing pictures of European paintings and sculptures. […] This is how I became interested in art,’ (Aramesh quoted in Yun, 2019). He initially pursued a PhD in chemistry, with a specialisation in crystallography. However, midway through his doctoral programme, he made the decision to dedicate his life to art. Even during his scientific education, his free time was consumed by creative painting, attending plays, visiting museums, and watching art-house films. In 1995, he enrolled at Goldsmiths College, London (now Goldsmiths University) to study fine art, graduating with an MFA in 1997. When he began his art training, Aramesh was struck by the course’s progressive structure, particularly its emphasis on a conceptual approach to art-making.

Aramesh’s artistic practice, spanning photography, sculpture, video, and performance, is deeply interwoven with art history, film, and literature. A key aspect of his work involves reframing the imagery of violence drawn from newspapers, digital articles, and social media, and often relating to war reportage. By extracting these images from their original contexts, Aramesh interrogates the visual language of subjugation and its entanglement with race, class, and sexuality. His creations challenge the canon of Western art history by disrupting its Eurocentric gaze. Through his reimagining of classical tropes, Aramesh introduces figures - often non-white, working-class, or entangled in the dynamics of political conflict - that complicate traditional narratives of power, victimhood, and oppression. Exploring regions like Algeria, Korea, Iraq, and Palestine, his work centres on prisoners and detainees. Collaborating with non-professional models, he has reimagined war reportage images within stately homes, focusing on male subjects to challenge the historical portrayal of women through a male gaze. He is also interested in the museum’s role in shaping public perceptions of art history, where the narratives often reflect hierarchical biases rooted in Eurocentric collections, and where non-white artistic expressions remain marginalised or are presented anthropologically, echoing the exclusion seen in ancient Greek vase paintings of non-Greek citizens. Aramesh allows ideas to emerge naturally. His fascination with Spanish polychrome sculptures, in particular, deepened after visiting The Sacred Made Real at London's National Gallery in 2010, where he connected 17th-century religious iconography to the Iraq War. This inspired a series directly engaging with European art history.

Aramesh has held numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2016, he was part of a group show, Uncertain States, at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, which assembled a powerful compendium of artistic responses to human struggle. By juxtaposing archival records with contemporary visual art, it weaved an evocative conversation between historical and modern narratives of displacement and crisis. Anchored around the archives of Art and Migration 1933–1945, the exhibition charted a trajectory of forced migration, tracing the lives of those uprooted, dispossessed, and dehumanised across time. Aramesh’s 2019 exhibition at the Asia Society Museum in New York explored the dynamics of power between oppressor and oppressed, as well as the media’s tendency to aestheticise wartime brutality. The display featured limewood sculptures inspired by 17th-century Spanish Christian depictions of martyred saints. Using primarily young, non-European male models, Aramesh gave his works a homoerotic undertone, layering religious and sexual dimensions onto portrayals of violence to reflect the use of sexual humiliation as a tool of military torture. In 2024 he represented Iran at the Venice Biennale, his work presented by MUNTREF (a museum in Buenos Aires that also includes the Museum of Immigration) with support from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. The exhibition, curated by New York-based, Ugandan-born curator, Serubiri Moses, was titled Number 207 and featured sculptures created specifically for the San Fantin Church in Venice. Among the works were 207 life-sized marble undergarments meticulously arranged across the church floor, evoking detention centres, revealed through the artist’s archival research. These sculptures engaged in a poignant dialogue with Leonardo Corona’s Baroque masterpiece, The Crucifixion, drawing attention to Christ’s draped loincloth in a contemporary context.

Reza Aramesh lives and works between London and New York, maintaining a studio in London Fields. In the UK public domain, his work is held at the Tate collection.

Related books

Serubiri Moses et al, Reza Aramesh - action: by number (Milan: Skira, 2024)
Milovan Farronato, Reza Aramesh: 12MIDNIGHT (Bologna: Damiani, 2014)
Geraldine A. Johnson, Reza Aramesh: them who dwell on the earth (Dubai: Canvas Central, 2011)
Thomas Frangenberg, Reza Aramesh: between the eye and the object falls a shadow (Dubai: B21 Gallery, 2009)

Public collections

Tate

Related organisations

Goldsmiths (student )

Selected exhibitions

Todo y nada están ahí para ser dichos (group show), Muntref Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2024-25)
Number 207 (solo exhibition), Venice Biennale/Chiesa San Fantin, Venice, Italy (2024)
Art Dubai (group show), Madinat Jumeirah Conference & Events Centre, Dubai, UAE (2024)
Action 182: At 01:01pm (solo installation), Collect Pond Park as part of The Off-Site Program at The Armory Show, New York, USA (2023)
Soft Edge of the blade vol. 2 ( group show), Zaal Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2023)
Realism (group show), No. 9 Cork Street, London (2023)
Distribution of the Sensible (group show), Azad Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2020)
Reza Aramesh (solo exhibition), Asia Society Museum, New York, USA (2019)
Uncertain States (group show), Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2016)
Migrants (group show), Muntref-Museo, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Reza Aramesh]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Reza Aramesh artist