SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- SF Camerawork is presenting Nasim Moghadam’s solo exhibition, And Yet, We See, a powerful meditation on what it means to see—and to be seen—when power seeks to erase you. With this body of work, Moghadam translates photographic images into sculptural and installation forms, creating immersive environments that confront erasure and give form to what power seeks to suppress. Her work explores how women’s bodies and voices are controlled, surveilled, and silenced, asserting agency where it is often denied.
Moghadam responds to survivors of the 2022 Iranian protests who were blinded by state violence. In Fallen Eyes, photographic images of their eyes appear across a sprawling field of magnolia leaves. Each leaf, gathered and prepared by hand, is both fragile and resolute, holding an image even as it dries. Together they form a delicate yet forceful installation that reads as a collective gaze returned, transforming the natural world into a site of witness and mourning.
Veiled self-portraits in Black Bars examine who is allowed to be visible and on whose terms. Moghadam places her own body within the frame while using layers of fabric to obscure her face, asserting control over what is revealed and withheld. Here the veil becomes a transformative surface rather than a barrier, complicating legibility and the politics of visibility.
In Noose, a fabric-based installation incorporating Iranian women’s hair, the artist’s own, and black fabric, Moghadam confronts the tangible threat of oppression. The sculpture acknowledges grief and loss while honoring resilience, courage, and solidarity, transforming a symbol of threat into a space of reflection, defiance, and vigilance.
These intimate, materially rich works create environments that hover between exposure and refuge, echoing strategies of survival practiced by women living under surveillance and repression. Throughout And Yet, We See, Moghadam subverts the imperial gaze, a one-directional perspective in which power dictates how others are seen. By returning vision and reclaiming agency, her installations show that looking is never neutral, but an act that refuses erasure and affirms endurance, courage, and vigilance.
Nasim Moghadam is a multidisciplinary installation-based artist whose practice confronts themes of discrimination, hyphenated identity, and the systemic control of women’s bodies and voices. Born in Iran and based in the Bay Area, she creates sculptural environments using photography, video, sound, and charged materials such as mirrors, broken bottles, dirt, textiles, and women’s hair. These elements carry layered symbolic weight, allowing her work to craft narratives inspired by the global struggle for women’s unalienable rights and to highlight resilience in the face of oppression.
Moghadam holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and currently teaches at California College of the Arts and Foothill College. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the H.A.R.D. Foundation, and SFAI, and has held fellowships and residencies at Recology, Makaan at Minnesota Street Project, Kala Art Institute, the Cubberley Artist Studio Program, and Building 180. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Italy, South Korea, and New York, and throughout the Bay Area at SFMOMA’s Soapbox Derby, the Museum of Craft and Design, Southern Exposure, Minnesota Street Project, and the San Francisco Arts Commission among others.
