Kunstmuseum Luzern opens career-spanning exhibition of photographer Shirana Shahbazi

Installation view Shirana Shahbazi. All at Once. An Interplay with Li Tavor, Kunstmuseum Luzern, 2026, Photo: Anne Morgenstern.

LUCERNE.— Shirana Shahbazi (*1974) enables the emergence of multi-layered spaces into which viewers can visually immerse themselves thanks to an artistic approach that involves mirroring, overlaying and repetition. Having begun with analogue photography, the Zurich artist has remained faithful to that medium for thirty years, while at the same time embedding a wide variety of techniques and other processes. Frequently the genesis of a work is rooted in an image that Shahbazi selects as her point of departure, developing it further in the course of a complex process.

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Shahbazi’s creativity features an experimental approach of the medium of photography. Her works show landscapes, buildings, people and objects. The artist translates her images into multi-layered depictions with the help of different printing techniques, such as screen printing or lithography. The works hover between figuration and abstraction and play with the aspect of ambiguity. This is reflected, for example, in her series entitled Displacement, which has been ongoing since 2023. For it, she photographs models of architectonic fragments that she sets up in her studio. Photographing them from several angles, the artist produces multi-layered analogue black-and-white prints which she intensifies by applying glazed colour gradients by hand.

In the series Displacement, spaces merge in such a way that it is no longer clear what is the top or the bottom, the inside or the outside. Complex multi-layered spaces of this kind in Shahbazi’s work constitute a recurring motif which she uses to fathom the relationship between perception, objective and subjective reality. This is also evident from her video work An Other Place 2023, in which she experimented for the first time with 16mm film. Shahbazi is creating a new video work for the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Luzern.

The exhibition Shirana Shahbazi. All at Once. An Interplay with Li Tavor presents works from different stages in the artist’s career. Although her oeuvre creates a dense web of surfaces, formats, colours and light, it is completely detached from space and time, and yet simultaneously anchored in the museum space. In addition to her works, the exhibition also includes works by Li Tavor and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.

In this interplay, Tavor responds to the exhibition architecture by means of latex panels hanging from the ceiling. Depending on your line of vision, these panels overlap with the works on the wall by Shahbazi. This gives rise to a three-dimensional dialogue which viewers can experience spatially.

The book accompanying the exhibition, Shirana Shahbazi. All at Once, is being published with the support of Binding Sélection d’Artistes. This extensive illustrated volume brings together Shahbazi’s most important works, presenting them in the context of the artist’s numerous spatial interventions. A temporary photographic installation by Shahbazi is currently visible in Zurich on the scaffolding around the Grossmünster, where it will remain for the duration of the comprehensive refurbishment of the cathedral.

Curated by Fanni Fetzer