Kamyar Bineshtarigh
Kamyar Bineshtarigh was born in 1996 in Semnan, Iran. He lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa and graduated from Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2019 where he won the Ruth Prowse prize for the best body of practical work. His work has been featured in a number of group exhibitions in Cape Town, including Shaping Things at SMAC Gallery and STILL at Everard Read Gallery. Bineshtarigh’s debut solo cubicle exhibition, Pilgrim, opened at Everard Read/Circa Gallery (Cape Town) in 2019. In 2018, he was awarded the VAA award by ARP Residency, which led to his video work Shelter being screened at the Corto Lovere film festival in Lovere, Italy. Bineshtarigh is currently studying at Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT)
An Exhaustive Catalogue of Texts Dealing with the Orient (Series). Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Bineshtarigh works in a variety of media, most notably painting and video. His conceptual concerns range from language, communication and the practice of writing and transliteration to the movement, migration and displacement of human bodies. Many of his paintings feature aspects of Farsi script and calligraphy, these textual elements often either broken up into pieces or pared down to a single painterly gesture, drawing parallels between pages of text and groups of bodies through repetitive mark-making.
Pilgrims, Still. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
His video works straddle the distinctions between cinema, documentary and video art. In his videos, he utilises cinematic techniques in order to poetically convey themes of displacement, conversely drawing on his own experiences of moving from Iran to South Africa in the depiction of his subjects.
Untitled (Ghazal No. 420). Photograph courtesy of the artist.