Sadaf H Nava is an Iranian born, New York city based visual artist and musician whose multidisciplinary interventions include experimental electronic sound, violin improvisations, drawing, painting, and film. Sadaf’s visuals, sonics, and confrontational performative tactics oscillate between opacity and narrative, often layered with cinematic and literary iterations. Sadaf’s work aims to confound and upend the inward-looking affect inherent to contemporary performance, simultaneously drawing from and subverting the languages of auto-fiction and the artist/muse relationship. Her original compositions present a mélange of intuitive and clashing material inspired by contemporary global archaeologies of sound, always flirting with noise. Her paintings and visual work follows a similar process of improvisation, with a focus on self portraiture, fragmented narratives and re-enacted memory.
Sadaf has presented work in solo exhibitions at Karma International and Luma Foundation Westbau in Zurich, performances and video works at MoMA PS1 Warm Up, ICA VCU, MoMa Sunday Sessions, Issue Project Room, Performa Festival, Gavin Brown Enterprises, Cannes Film Festival: Short Film Corner, Yale Union art space, 9th Berlin Biennale, the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, 3HD Festival in Berlin, and Hyperlocal Festival in London. Her work has been featured in publications such as Pitchfork, The Wire, ID magazine, V magazine, Artforum Critics’ Picks, FADER and the Guardian UK. Her debut EP, SHELL, was released on LA based label Outside Insight, and her first full-length LP, History of Heat, was released on Brooklyn based label Blueberry Records online and in limited edition Vinyl.