From issue: #27 Emerging Talent
Zahra Babaei, My Two Bodies
My Two Bodies explores visibility, memory and the politics of representation. Zahra Babaei works with photography, fabric, found objects and performance to draw attention to the surface of the image and question what can be seen, recorded or remembered, and what is erased. Fabric plays a central role in her practice. As a child, it was her first point of contact, a second skin that was part of both the body and the home. More than a covering, it became an extension of the self, turning everyday into something tactile and embodied.
Growing up with a hidden body and watching television that often erased women entirely, she learned to read images through absence. In Western media, the covered woman is rendered doubly invisible, first through the veil and then through the framing of the image itself. Even when she is seen, she is truly not seen. The photograph reduces her to another figure. Fabric, rather than softening this effect, heightens it. She becomes a surface for projection, mythologised, ghosted, made into a symbol. Babaei’s work stays with its complexities, looking toward the edges of what images obscure.
She tells her story in the third person, through a figure who leaves the frame but leaves fabric behind, a trace of refusal. Into that absence come other presences, including Victorian mothers, colonial silhouettes and archival doubles. These figures blur together across layers of fabric, glass and projection, where the digital and the physical press against each other. Through perforated surfaces, shifting reflections and disrupted light, Babaei resists smooth representation and instead makes visible the structures through which images are formed.
Born in Tehran in 1996, Zahra Babaei is a transdisciplinary artist based in Rochester, New York. Her work explores the materiality of the invisible and the gendered politics of veiling, drawing on photography, video and performance to examine the limits of what can be seen. She holds a BA in Photography from the Tehran University of Art and recently completed an MFA in Photography and Related Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work has been published in PhMuseum and IMA Magazine, and shown at Bazar Art Book Fair, Delgosha Gallery and Tropic Bound 2025.
Awarded the Photoworks Curatorial Mentorship
