DIRECTORY 2026

Nebras Hoveizavi | Photography, Video, Installation

Nebras Hoveizavi (b. Ahvaz, Iran) is an Arab-Iranian artist and educator working across experimental film, photography, installation, and poetry. After earning her B.F.A. (2014) and M.F.A. (2016) in Photo/Media from the California Institute of the Arts, she developed a multidisciplinary practice rooted in the transformation of language into image. Currently based in Qatar, where she teaches film and photography, Hoveizavi's work has been exhibited internationally, including "Body Politics" at the Whitechapel Gallery (London) and "Cinema Iran: The 6th Edition" (Munich). Originally trained as a poet writing in Farsi, migration disrupted her relationship with language, leading her to develop a visual vocabulary as an alternative form of expression. Her films, photographs, and installations function as poetry translated into visual form.

Hoveizavi's practice engages with displacement, memory, borders, and the limits of language. Working across photography, video, and experimental media, she approaches image-making as a form of witnessing, transforming observation into a visual language shaped by lived experience. What could no longer be expressed through words found its way into images, where looking, sensing, and recording became an alternative vocabulary. Central to her work is the experience of relocation and disorientation, the coexistence of familiarity and estrangement. She questions fixed notions of borders, viewing them as imaginary constructs that shape identity and memory. Currently, Hoveizavi is reconnecting with writing, developing poetry and short stories alongside her visual work, allowing language and image to inform and reshape one another.

www.nebrashoveizavi.com
@nebras_hoveizavi