Sahar Askary
Artist Statement
Sahar Askary's artistic practice explores memory, displacement, and place through material, space, and collective experience. Working across installation, photography, video, and textile, she examines how personal narratives intersect with broader social and environmental contexts. Her work is grounded in slow, material-based processes. She often works with everyday and repurposed materials, treating them as sites of memory shaped by use, care, and time. More recently, she started experimenting with fermentation as both material and method. By engaging with its temporal, transformative qualities, she uses it as a way to think about preservation, decay, and the transmission of knowledge. Sahar's installations invite reflection on belonging, loss, and continuity, approaching memory not as fixed or static, but as an ongoing process reshaped through interaction, material encounter, and collective ritual.
Bio
Sahar Askary is a Toronto-based multimedia artist working across installation, photography, video, and textile. Her practice explores memory, displacement, and identity through process-driven approaches. Her work draws on auto-ethnographic approaches developed through her MFA studies in Documentary Media. She examines how memory becomes embedded in objects, gestures, and environments, and how these traces persist and shift across time and geography. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions in Canada and internationally and has been recognized with awards including the Toronto Newcomer Arts Award. She has participated in artist residencies including The Ray Ferris Creative Tech Springboard and is engaged in community-based projects that bring together art and storytelling. Most recently, she curated Breaking Boundaries, a show featuring newcomer artists for Toronto Newcomer Week.