Aryana Minai

Aryana Minai is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work excavates identity, architecture, inherited cultures, history, and materials through an Iranian-American lens and upbringing. Her work reconfigures traditional architectural forms, questions the foundations of these patterns and structures, and expresses these forms as culminations of histories and events passed down through generations.

Aryana Minai’s work is intimately linked to philosophies and histories of architecture, migration, labor, the body, and the handmade. Minai takes paper as something linked between tradition and craft, concerning the diasporic subject’s daily lived experiences in the Iranian-American context. The work focuses on how a survival instinct to acknowledge inhabited spaces led to a gradual reduction of materials and an interest in teaching and learning from materials through generations. While she utilizes bricks and woodblocks to emboss these permutations on pulp, the works themselves also become architectural. Minai ultimately envisions architecture as a living entity that continually sheds and acquires memories as bodies pass through its spaces.