FARRAH KARAPETIAN

Farrah Karapetian (b. CA 1978) is an artist and public thinker from Los Angeles. She is recognized for her work in haptic, cameraless photography, recognizing the medium's physical potentials and how these counteract archival and commercial omissions and elisions. Karapetian's broader strategy is a research based practice that engages multiple mediums to synthesize narratives of the agency of individuals in the face of personal or political change. Her work since 2015 has focused on the period between the World Wars as a moment at which contemporary vocabularies of anticapitalism, decolonization, and relations between genders were developed in transnational revolutionary creative practice. 

 

Karapetian's artwork is in public collections that include the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. She is a recipient of a Art Prospect Network 2021 Fellowship, spending June 2022 in Uzbekistan; a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (2020); a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia (2018); a Pollock-Krasner Award (2017); a California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship (2014); and a Warhol Arts Writers Grant (2013); among other honors. 

 

Recent institutional exhibitions include Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now, Eskenazi Museum (2023); Sightlines SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2022); The Fabric of Felicity, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018); Synthesize, MOCA Jacksonville (2017); Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016.) 

 

She holds an MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles and a BA from Yale University. As tenured faculty in the Department of Art, Architecture + Art History at the University of San Diego, she works on reorienting the history and practice of various art mediums for a more critically engaged future. In that context and in other public roles, she creates opportunities for transnational intellectual, political, and artistic relay.