Sholeh Asgary

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose works implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary is heavily influenced by her early somatic experiences in constant movement across borders. From this positionality lies an inherent tension throughout her work: between visibility and opacity, history and myth, worldmaking and death--with none in opposition to the other. This complexity drives the core of her work.

​An affiliate artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, she is also a 2021 artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, UCLA Art Sci, ARoS Kunstmuseum, Real Time & Space, and Temescal Arts Center. Recent exhibitions, performances, and screenings include Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Minnesota Street Project, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Charlotte Street Foundation, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Flux Factory. Asgary is a recipient of a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant for her solo exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NY), a 2019 Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Project Grant through Dance Elixir, a 2020/21 California Arts Council Artists in Communities Grant for her program MAJLES, a 2022 SECA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) nominee, and a recipient of the 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for her curatorial initiatives as Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery, where she also founded The Project Room. Asgary also has several ongoing collaborative projects, including those with Abou Farman, Julie Ezelle Patton, Dena A. Al-Adeeb, and Heather Kapplow. Currently residing in Oakland, CA, she is a Lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley and serves on the Curatorial Council for Southern Exposure. Asgary holds an MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University.