BANI KHOSHNOUDI

Bani Khoshnoudi

Filmmaker – Visual Artist

Born in Tehran, Iran

Lives in Mexico City and Montreuil, France

2022 Recipient of the prestigious Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film and Video, Bani Khoshnoudi is a filmmaker and visual artist born in Tehran, Iran and raised in the United States, in Texas. She studied architecture, photography and film at the University of Texas at Austin, and later continued her studies in the visual arts at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City. Her works, inhabited by displacement and uprooting, explore themes of exile, modernity and its violences, memory and the invisible. While her main documentary and fiction films Transit (2005), A People in the Shadows (2008), The Silent Majority Speaks (2010-14), Fireflies (2018); dig into the layers, stories and experiences related to global migrations, nomadisms and historical struggles for freedom, her photographs and installations also work with the textures and traces of these stories; architecture and ruins. Her most well known film, the documentary essay The Silent Majority Speaks, was banned in Lebanon in 2014 and considered as “offensive to the Iranian regime”. This political fresco about 100 years of political revolt in Iran was included in Georges Didi-Huberman’s exhibition book, “Uprisings” for the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, and was named by French curator and critic, Nicole Brenez, as one of ten essential films of the century. In 2014 she collaborated with filmmaker Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann on their project “Labor in a Single Shot” in Mexico City. Her second feature fiction, Fireflies won the HBO Best Ibero-American Feature at the Miami International Film Festival and was shown worldwide. Bani’s work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Serralves in Porto, Fondation Cartier, MUAC and Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, at the Biennale di Venezia, among others. She divides her time between Mexico City and Paris.

CV

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