Yellow River from the River series, 2020, lapis lazuli, pigment, hand-carved on found wood, 11 x 10.5 inches.

Brooklyn based, Iranian born artist Bahar Behbahani's multilayered work explores the complexities of memory, loss, adaptation, and a fundamental search for a sense of place. Her central, multi-tiered subject for the past decade has been the Persian garden, one that she has re-tooled to her personal and shared history. Her research-based practice on the natural realm encompasses the aesthetic, the poetic, the philosophical, the socio-political, and the ecological, weaving together past, present, and future.

In 2019 Behbahani was granted a Creative Capital award for an upcoming project Ispahan Flowers Only Once, a community garden inspired by Persian garden design, philosophy, plants and flora, which will bring people together to take part and re-activate unseen histories by gathering and gardening.

Behbahani's work was most recently featured in the solo exhibition, Let the Garden Eram Flourish, at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, Curator of African Art. Her multidisciplinary series of Garden Coup has been shown in Thomas Erben Gallery in New York and the 11th Shanghai Biennale, China in 2016. Her project, The Color of Soil Never Lies was featured in the 7th Moscow Biennale, Russia, and her work has also been shown at The 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Sharjah Biennial 10, UAE; The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, MI; and The Tribeca Film Festival, NY; among others. Her film Behind the Mirrors premiered at Fireflies in the Night, curated by Robert Storr, Kalliopi Minioudaki, and Barbara London in partnership with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Greece in 2016.

Behbahani has also been awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; an Art Omi International Artists Residency by The Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, Ghent, NY; and The Brown Foundation Fellows Program, based at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, in addition to others.

In 2018, Behbahani was selected as one of the Drawing Center's Open Session artists and her work will be exhibited there in conjunction with the program in 2019.

Behbahani is a recipient of the 2019 Cultural Space Subsidy Program Two Trees, in Dumbo, Brooklyn.