Multimedia
Residency Dates: August 2026
Studio H Canada is thrilled to welcome Saruye, an emerging, Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary visual artist from Toronto, Canada. Saruye works across painting, installation, performance, photography, and lens-based media. Drawing from her experience of migration from Iran to Canada, she explores cultural duality, language, memory, and the ongoing negotiation of diasporic identity. Her work brings Persian visual traditions and historical imagery into conversation with contemporary experience. Through humour, contradiction, material experimentation, and shifts between intimate and political perspectives, she challenges fixed ideas of identity and belonging. During the residency she will develop multidisciplinary work exploring cultural memory, displacement, and the body as a site of translation.
My practice comes from a place of in-betweenness. I migrated from Iran young enough for parts of my Persian identity to become distant, but late enough that becoming fully Western was never possible either. That distance has never been empty. It shifts with what I encounter where I am and with what unfolds in Iran.
Right now, politics is taking up more space in my work because it is taking up more space in life. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement, what has continued through the Lion and Sun movement, and the massacre of Iranians in January 2026 have changed the weight of that distance for me. There are moments when watching from elsewhere feels very far away, and others when there is almost no distance at all.
My current interests lie in what that does to memory, language, imagery, and my understanding of where I come from. Persian historical and cultural references appear in my work alongside things happening now, not necessarily to explain one another, but because this is how they exist in my mind.
At this point in my practice, I often bring together things that seem like they should contradict each other: humour and violence, familiarity and strangeness, and the historical and the immediate. The past does not stay in the past, and the political does not stay outside the personal.
About the Artist
Saruye is an Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, performance, and lens-based media. She earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University in 2025. Her work has been presented in exhibitions in Canada, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She has participated in artist residencies in Iran and Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts in Toronto.
Having moved from Iran to Canada at sixteen, Saruye’s practice is informed by migration and the experience of existing between cultures. Her current interests consider how identity is shaped and reshaped through language, memory, politics, history, and place. Drawing from Persian visual and historical references alongside lived experience, her work often brings together humour, discomfort, repetition, and contradiction.
Her recent recognition includes the Takao Tanabe Education Scholarship, the Ontario-Ukraine Solidarity Cultural Exchange Scholarship, and the From Our Point of View: Encounters with Artists Research and Creation Award. Her practice continues to move between personal and political spaces, with a growing interest in how contemporary events reshape her relationship to Iran, distance, and cultural memory.
You can learn more about Saruye on their website: https://saruye.com/ and follow them on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saruyeofficial/.
Artists of all media and disciplines are welcome to apply to Studio H Canada International Art Residency – please check out the link here to apply.
Check out previous posts about artists here.
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