Sadaf H. Nava is an Iranian-born visual artist and musician based in New York. Her practice operates across sound, performance, painting, drawing, installation, and video, constructing a hybrid language that moves between memoir and fiction. Through fragmented narratives, re-enactment, and cinematic staging, her work interrogates the instability of memory and the construction of diasporic identity.Her sonic practice combines experimental electronic composition, violin, and voice, drawing from Persian vocal techniques such as tahrir. The voice is treated as an incantatory and temporal instrument, unfolding through dissonance, repetition, and rupture. This approach extends into her visual work, where improvisation structures compositions that oscillate between figuration and dispersion. Across media, self-portraiture and narrative fracture function as methods to examine embodiment, projection, and psychic multiplicity. Engaging with auto-fiction, her work probes the tension between personal and collective histories, often addressing the artist–muse relation and its gendered, cultural implications. Informed by a background in Performance Studies, her practice integrates theoretical inquiry with material experimentation, producing a dialogue between lived experience and constructed image systems.
Her work has been presented at institutions including Karma International, Luma Westbau, MoMA PS1, ICA VCU, Performa, and the 9th Berlin Biennale, and featured in publications such as Artforum, The Wire, and The Guardian. Her recordings include the EP SHELL and the LP History of Heat.
