Zahak-nameh is an ongoing series of narrative paintings by Aileen Bahmanipour, initiated in Iran in 2012 and first exhibited at Vancouver’s grunt gallery in 2017. After a prolonged pause, she returned to the series in 2024, amid the unrelenting wars and systemic violences sweeping across the Middle East—conflicts sustained, in part, by the strategic complicity of Western powers, including Canada.
The early works in Zahak-nameh draw from Persian mythology and epic literature, fusing Persian traditional miniature painting with anatomical and biological illustrations. These references form a visual language through which Bahmanipour explores the body as both subject and site of historical memory. In the most recent work, she shifts toward a contemporary narrative, examining the ruptured body of today—physical, cultural, and political.
This is a body in crisis. Its organs are severed, estranged from the whole, yet still tenuously linked—still performing, still striving to sustain a failing system. Some of these organs are speculative, imagined for a body yet to come: a future form born from catastrophe, assembled in the aftermath of a blast.
Aileen Bahmanipour (b.1990-Tehran) is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist. After ten years of living and working on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, known as Vancouver, and in Bella Coola Valley, the traditional territory of Nuxalk people, She recently relocated to Grande Prairie, Alberta, where she teaches visual arts at Northwestern Polytechnic. Bahmanipour holds a BFA in Painting from Tehran University of Art and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She has also taught as a sessional faculty member and is a part of the Continuing Studies program at the Emily Carr University of Art+Design. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including her solo and group exhibitions at the GlogauAIR (Berlin), Alternator Centre for the Contemporary Arts (Kelowna), Vancouver’s grunt gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation, Artspeak, Two Rivers Gallery (Prince George), and Aaran Art gallery (Tehran), among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in 2017, the Early Career Development grant from BC Arts Council in 2019, and consecutive Canada Council for the Arts grants from 2021 to 2025. Her work has been featured in publications such as Femme Art Review and ThimbleBerry and is held in the permanent collection at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George,
–BC.
