Southern Guild is pleased to announce its representation of multimedia visual artist Kamyar Bineshtarigh.

Born in 1996 in Semnan, Iran, Bineshtarigh’s expanding body of work has a clear central feature: the explorative use of Farsi script and calligraphy. In 2019, the artist graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art from Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town, where he was awarded the Ruth Prowse Award for his series An Exhaustive Catalogue of Texts Dealing with the Orient. In 2021, he was honoured with the Simon Gerson Prize for his graduate exhibition at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

Bineshtarigh’s practice draws from a woven fabric of intersectional narratives. The artist’s interest in scripture has become a means to study the nature of mark-making. His text-based works act as a palimpsestic visual pilgrimage toward and beneath the linguistic power of written language, of place and space and their capacity build our conceived worlds. Script carries our collectively imposed meaning but also a multitude of intuitive translations and an innate aesthetic of form and shape. There is the additive act of layering in Bineshtarigh’s works; at times, the artist has utilised canvas, ink, shards of glass and glue, the dilapidated walls of his own studio. The artist works in a magnanimous scale, often creating site-specific installations that are arresting in their intimate capacity to envelope the viewer.

In 2021, Bineshtarigh was awarded a Creative Knowledge Resources (CKR) Fellowship, an interdisciplinary project by the National Research Foundation and UCT studying socially engaged artistic practices in Africa and its diaspora. In the same year, Bineshtarigh participated in several group exhibitions including My Whole Body Changed into Something Else at Stevenson Gallery. In 2020 and 2021 the artist curated his own independent solo exhibition showcasing his body of work (Hafez) The Tongue of the Unseen Realms in a factory warehouse in Salt River, Cape Town. In 2022, he presented koples boek(e) at the Goethe Institute, Johannesburg.

As the inaugural winner of the Bowmans Young Artist Award, Bineshtarigh presented a solo exhibition, titled Uncover, at the Norval Foundation in 2022. He currently lives and works in Cape Town.