FARRAH KARAPETIAN

Farrah Karapetian is an artist and writer based in Southern California whose work across mediums privileges the agency of the individual in moments of change. Her work is in collections such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, and SFMOMA; has been exhibited in the Bienalsur in Cúcuta, Colombia; the Orange County Museum's California-Pacific Triennial; and the Border Art Biennial at the El Paso Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez; as well as in exhibitions at the Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; and many other institutions and galleries. It has garnered support from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Fulbright, among other sources. It's been discussed in such publications as Artforum and Art in America and is included in textbooks such as Photography: a Cultural History, (Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2021); Constructed: The Contemporary History of the Constructed Image in Photography Since 1990 (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2019); Global Photography: A Critical History (Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, 2019); and in Charlotte Cotton’s survey of contemporary trends in fine art photography, Photography is Magic, published by Aperture in 2015. Her own writing has been published widely, from The Brooklyn Rail to The Los Angeles Review of Books, and has earned a Warhol Arts Writers Grant. She holds a BA from Yale (2000) and UCLA (2008) and is an associate professor at USD – faculty with the Dept. of Art, Architecture + Art History as well as with Africana Studies. She speaks often about her research: at Harvard, Princeton, Vanderbilt, and internationally at SOMA in Mexico City, Potsdam’s Brandenburgisches Zentrum Für Medienwissenschaften, and the Museum of the History of Photography in St. Petersburg, Russia. Residencies and collaborations in Mexico, Uzbekistan, and Colombia are part of her holistic creative practice, which includes in each case situated research, co-creation through workshopping, subject-facing exhibitions, and publishing. She encourages transboundary practices that use doubt, curiosity, and nuance to combat monolithic personal or political certainty and elide institutional histories.