Sara AbbasnejadSara Abbasnejad (b.1983, Ahvaz, Iran) is a visual artist and researcher based in Canada. She works with photography, video essay, and archival material as her means of research to explore the dialogues between personal imagery and historical documents, situating photographs within a landscape of erased geographies, unofficial stories, and archival silences. Her practice investigates how literature, storytelling, and speculative strategies can place images in tension with official records, unsettling dominant historical narratives.

Abbasnejad’s ongoing project, The (Un)Seen, explores the absent and erased histories of women in Abadan, a city shaped by the oil industry yet narrated almost exclusively through masculine archives. The project engages with fragments of memory, oral histories, and feminist geographies to counter the industrial and official cartographies produced by oil companies and state authorities. By bringing together family albums, personal archives, and literary narratives, Abbasnejad incorporates fiction not as embellishment but as a method of challenging histories that cannot be fully told through facts alone.

The first episode, I’ve Left My Bones on the Shore, began as a photo essay and remains ongoing, now expanding into video. The second episode is Between Waves and Silence, Something Lingers (2025), a 45-minute film composed of archival documents, family photographs, and hand-drawn maps, which reconstructs traces of disappeared women, unnamed streets, and the brothel district of Doob, absent from official records yet resurfacing in scattered stories. The third episode, currently in development, is conceived as a visual travelogue and video essay in dialogue with the celebrated Abadani writer Qazi Rabihavi, drawing on literary archives, oral histories, and speculative cartographies to further question the gendered erasures embedded in official histories of the city.

Abbasnejad’s works have been shown internationally, including exhibitions and screenings at Atelier Nord (Oslo), O Gallery (Tehran), Ester Gallery (Berlin), Hinterland Gallery (Vienna), Aran Gallery (Tehran), and the upcoming Verdensrommet Festival (Oslo, 2025). She has been supported by awards and residencies such as the Davvi Centre for Performing Arts (Hammerfest, 2024), the BKV150 Grant (Norwegian Visual Artists’ Fund), the Shifting Panoramas Digital Residency (Berlin–Amsterdam, 2020–21), and a production grant from the Fritt Ord Foundation (2023).

She received her MFA in Fine Arts from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Norway) and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts (Italy). Before relocating to Canada, she worked as a photographer and journalist in Iran, where her projects critically engaged with stereotypes and clichés in Iranian photography. Abbasnejad continues to develop her artistic research through visual storytelling, archival engagement, and feminist methodologies, situating her practice at the intersections of memory, gender, and the politics of image-making.