Shaqayeq Arabi is a painter, sculptor, and installation artist.
Arabi’s work finds its point of departure in image, sound, and smell, as well as the sensitivity of the surrounding environment. In sketching, composing, and connecting accumulated fragments, Arabi traces her reminiscences, creating a tangible and touchable reality out of the emotions and sensations.
She received her Bachelor's in Graphic Design from Al-Zahra University, Tehran, a BFA from the University of Valenciennes, France, and an MFA from Sorbonne University, Paris.
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My work is often composed of simple materials, fundamentally abstract, yet evoking a range of associations, speaking to both the built, urban environment and the natural world. My materials are a bricolage of fragments and objects found throughout my daily life, assembled and transformed into sculptures, installations, or architectural structures, exploring the shifting relationships between representation, abstraction, and materiality.
The process is intuitive, spontaneous, and intimate.
My large-scale and immersive environments typically combine found objects with natural elements, including metal mesh, wire, paper, film, glue, twigs, plants, wood, and paint. Loosely held together or freely hanging, the individual components perform a tenuous balancing act, seeking an equilibrium between adaptation and stability.
Natural materials have a life span unto themselves; they possess internal and external existential references to the patterns of life and decay, to the fragmentary and fragile nature of our life, and to the intricate relationship between humanity and its habitat.
I embrace the vulnerability and build upon the fragility of our hopes and dreams, the delicacy of our feelings, and the sensitivity of our senses.
Each work is part of the ongoing practice & built upon the previous projects and integrated into the next.
Shaqayeq Arabi, Oct 2022
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I enjoy working with humble, often fragile materials — earth, rags, twigs, stones, glass, paper — materials of the everyday, materials that refuse to pretend.
I pair them with industrial elements:
a quiet tension, raw, unpolished, resistant to the slickness that surrounds the art world.
I want my work to stay accessible, familiar, imperfect. I want it to remain vulnerable, to hold the qualities we often overlook — the fleeting, the human, the real.
Ephemerality has become part of this language, allowing materials to shift, age, and eventually transform into something else
In a digital, content-saturated culture built on permanence, replication, constant visibility, and endless consumption, choosing to make something impermanent feels almost rebellious, insisting on presence and touch.
Ephemerality becomes a counter-gesture — a refusal to follow the logic of digital permanence.
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Shaqayeq Arabi, November 2025