SOUTHERN GUILD ARTIST PROFILE: KAMYAR BINESHTARIGH
Kamyar Bineshtarigh was born in Semnan, Iran in 1996. Now based in Cape Town, he works in a variety of media. His conceptual concerns range from language and communication in all its forms, to the movement, migration, and displacement of humankind.
Bineshtarigh graduated from Cape Town Creative Academy with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in contemporary art in 2024 and a Diploma in Fine Art from Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town in 2019, where he received the Ruth Prowse Award for his series An Exhaustive Catalogue of Texts Dealing with the Orient. In 2021, he was awarded the Simon Gerson Prize for his graduate exhibition at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, as well as a Creative Knowledge Resources Fellowship from the National Research Foundation and UCT.
The artist’s interest in text, particularly Arabic script and calligraphy, has become an explorative means to study the nature of mark-making and the cultural complexities that often arise through translation. Script carries our collectively imposed meaning but also a multitude of intuitive translations, as well as an innate aesthetic of form and shape. This is embodied through the additive act of layering in Bineshtarigh’s works, with the artist utilising canvas, ink, pencil, shards of glass, glue, or layers of paint extracted from the very walls of his studio. He frequently works on an immersive scale, creating site-specific installations that are arresting in their capacity to envelope the viewer.
Bineshtarigh’s 2023 solo exhibition at Southern Guild Cape Town, 9 Hopkins, was an exploration of gestural mark-making and an engagement with the urban fabric of Salt River, an historic semi-industrial area near central Cape Town. The exhibition’s works find their conceptual origins in the smeared handprints and remnants of paint, lacquer, grease and grit he observed on the walls of a panel-beating workshop located in the same complex as his studio at the time. The walls of Bineshtarigh’s own studio also bore the traces of its particular history, which included housing a garment factory employing only white women before the promulgation of segregationist policy shifted this to low-income labour of Coloured and later, Black women. The entire complex was demolished soon after the creation of this body of work, which now stands as an archive of human presence, physical labour and the city’s shifting economic and racial divides.
His second solo with the gallery, Group Show (2025), further refines his surface transfer technique in a study of lifted walls and floors from the studios of artists working in South Africa. The series of extractions gives form to Bineshtarigh’s curiosity around artists’ creative processes, with each work carrying layers of history and energy from its original site, the studio.
Bineshtarigh’s other solo exhibitions include koples boek(e) at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg (2021), Pilgrim as part of Everard Read’s Cubicle Series (2019), and Uncover at Norval Foundation (2022), which named him the winner of the Bowmans Young Artists Award. In 2024, koples boek(e) won the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Best Emerging Artist/Curator from South Africa’s National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Southern Guild has presented his work at Frieze New York, The Aspen Art Fair, Expo Chicago, The Armory Show in New York and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, for which he was selected by critic/curator Sean O’Toole for the SOLO Section in 2024. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, NIROX Foundation, Association for Visual Arts, Stevenson, SMAC and Everard Read. His work formed part of two group exhibitions at Southern Guild Los Angeles, Mother Tongues and signifying the impossible song, both in 2024. His work is in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, among others.
