Ramin Takloo-Bighash

Chicago, IL

Artist Statement

I search for that elusive it that gets eliminated from one’s life when a person has been subjected to trauma over long stretches of time. I grew up in southern Iran and moved to the US immediately following my 21st birthday in 1995, so these notions are very personal to me. Something happens to you when you see someone be torn to pieces in an air raid. When you grow up queer, but you occasionally hear that a queer person has been hanged for no crime other than being queer. When you are ten years old, and you wake up one morning to the news that the cousin you were close to has died in a chemical warfare attack. When you are thirteen years old, and you get punched in the face fighting over bread after waiting in line for three hours in 130-degree heat. But until not too long ago I wasn’t even aware that I needed to talk about these concepts. In the passing moments when I did consider talking about my traumatic experiences, I quickly talked myself out of doing so. I told myself that the emotions accompanying my thoughts were melancholic stupidity that didn’t deserve recognition. And that experience felt like threading a needle in darkness, a darkness that was swallowing my voice, something akin to screaming under water. A continuum of darkness had filled the outside, the inside, and the space that separated the two. But the space that separated the outside and the inside is where it had lived. Where it and I had lived. Where we had stayed for years, waiting to find a way to come inside, to leave the margins of reality and materialize, to acquire shape. And the shape we acquired was that of scribblings on large sheets of papers. Of steel rods somewhat resembling words. Words to replace what it is like to scream. Words to emulate keeping quiet. Words to represent pain. Words resembling the things we brought. The things we left behind. The shape of words that were written, of animals that were harmed, the words that were not meant to be read, the animals who were rescued, of cups and ashtrays that sit gathering dust, of walkways, of parks, of playgrounds where terrifying things had happened, of pottery wheels, and little plants that grow out of clay pots just before they are put in the kiln, of people cooking, of my mother at home, of old music, of huddling together and gossiping, of watching my mother age, of my youngest sister being the oldest person in the world, of surviving. Art is not a luxury when you search for that of which you’ve been robbed.

Sample Work

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Artist Bio

Ramin Takloo-Bighash (b. 1974, Sarbandar, Iran) is a Chicago-based multi-disciplinary artist who received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2023. In his work, Ramin explores immigration, war, trauma, isolation, and imprisonment—experiences that are very personal to him. Ramin is an immigrant, and even though he has lived more than half of his life in the US there is a part of him that still feels like a person in exile. A basic question that Ramin grapples within in his practice is: what happens to language in the face of trauma? Persian calligraphy, and its, often wordless, incarnations in painting, sculpture, and cartography, forms the core of Ramin’s artistic practice. Other than calligraphy and sculpture, Ramin’s practice also includes painting, writing, music, photography, and film.