Greece in USA presents a performance and printmaking series by Aphrodite Désirée Navab, curated by Sozita Goudouna, now on view in New York City.

Navab’s latest body of work transforms ancient Iranian textile traditions into a contemporary act of resistance. Through performance-based monoprints, the artist stamps her own body and personal belongings in blue and black ink, evoking her family’s years in exile and standing in solidarity with Iranian women protesting gender apartheid.

From private to public, body to paper, personal to universal, Navab’s art becomes both ritual and rebellion — a call for collective imagination and freedom.

Aphrodite Navab
“Goddess Rosing:Black and Blue”
(2024-present)
Performance art monoprints
Artist’s body and/or belongings
Farsi alphabet blocks
Isfahan ghalamkar woodblock
Ink on paper

41 Division St
NYC

The @libraryresidency is pleased to welcome Aphrodite Desiree Navab as our December 2025 Artist in Residence.

📍 59 Panepistimiou Street, Athens

According to Jennifer Heath “All exiled Iranian-born artists are not alike. The comparison is too facile. Although she uses iconographies of her (first) homeland(s), often using her flesh as canvas, the intent and content of Navab’s work seems less akin to that of, say Shirin Neshat, than to the private performances of the late Ana Mendieta, who in adolescence was ripped from her home in Cuba (also in desperate response to a revolution), and sent to live, alien and isolated in Iowa. Like Mendieta’s, Navab’s work is a manifestation of the need for roots and the desire to belong as well as a celebration of UNbelonging. In her performances (captured in photographs), Mendieta, like Navab, revisited the place of her beginnings, used her own body as a map to direct her toward home, home hidden and disguised by layers of time and absence. Her performances, like Navab’s were rituals, charms against the sorrows and cruelties of displacement, disorientation, and rootlessness. These are shamanic acts, always veiled, for the shaman cannot reach the other side and pull back the curtains unless she is masked…”

This #LibraryResidency is a @greeceinus project, presented under the auspices and with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture @minculturegr and Ekkomed @ekkomed_gr @creativehub.gr.ekkomed

#AphroditeDesireeNavab @aphroditedesiree #ArtistInResidence #LibraryResidency #IranianArtist GreekArtist NewYorkArtist ContemporaryArt PerformanceArt GreekMinistryOfCulture GreeceInUSA AthensArtScene