Hoda Zarbaf (1982-2020) was an Iranian-Canadian Artist who created and showed her work between places.
Her sculptural compositions are mainly made up of found imageries/sounds/items that have individual human traces in them: used socks, youtube videos, worn T-shirts, online sound sculptures, restock monitors, human hair, abandoned dolls, and throwaway furniture. The artist, therefore, raises the issue of memory, while simultaneously making the absence of the former owners appear as an empty space and irretrievable loss. She joins these discarded, forgotten— and seemingly useless—pieces with self-made ceramics, lights, sounds, videos, or patchwork elements, giving them a new narrative. The uncanny and absurd character that Hoda Zarbaf’s sculptures exude are witnesses to fragility; they are expressions of overlapping psychological states that speak of desires, pain, nostalgia – and melancholy.
