班尼·科什努迪 Bani Khoshnoudi

Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran and immigrated to the United States in 1979 during the revolution. She studied architecture, photography and cinema at the University of Texas at Austin, and then continued her studies at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her works, inhabited by displacement and uprooting, explore themes of exile, modernity and its relation to the non-Western world, memory and the invisible. While her documentary and fiction films (Transit (2005), A People in the Shadows (2008), The Silent Majority Speaks (2010-14), Luciérnagas (2018), …) dig into the layers, stories and experiences related to global migrations, nomadisms and historical struggles for freedom, her photographs and installations also work with the textures and traces of these stories; architecture and ruins, human imprints on the earth. Her most well known film, the documentary essay The Silent Majority Speaks, was banned in Lebanon and considered “offensive to the Iranian regime”. This political fresco about 100 years of political revolt in Iran was included in Georges Didi-Huberman’s exhibition book, Uprisings for the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, and was named by French programmer and cinema historian, Nicole Brenez, as one of ten essential films of the century. In 2014 she collaborated with filmmaker Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann on their project “Labor in a Single Shot” in Mexico City. Bani’s work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Serralves in Porto, Fondation Cartier, MUAC Museum of Contemporary Art and Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Zaghreb, among others. In 2022, Bani was awarded the prestigious Herb Alpert Award for the Arts in Film/Video.