Cima Khademi
My work is a reflection of my early years in Iran and my adolescence in the Deep South. My creative practice is an exploration of balance within diasporic space; where class, gender, and ethnicity continuously shape one another through materials, metaphors, and the stories they hold.
There are many words that attempt to articulate the experience of immigration, but one state consistently emerges for me: the moment in which identity and homeland are called into question. This perpetual inquiry creates a sense of estrangement, a distance from both past and present. Nostalgia becomes an inevitable consequence, first felt as a longing for untouched, unaltered spaces of the past, but eventually transforming into the foundation for a new personal narrative as one learns to accept and inhabit the present.
My current body of work consists of mixed-media installations that construct a visual language of memory and identity. These pieces navigate the shifting terrain between remembrance and reinvention, weaving together the fragments that arise from living in between worlds. The body, its vulnerabilities, histories, and rituals, serves as the central site within my practice. It is where memory settles, where identity is negotiated, and where cultural history is carried forward. Elements of Persian architecture, tiled surfaces, and intricate patterns surface throughout my work, not as replicas of the past but as echoes. Material reminders through which memory can shift, open, and transform.
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Cima Khademi is a first-generation Iranian-American artist and educator based in Birmingham, Alabama. Working in sculpture and mixed media, her practice reflects the immigrant experience, a place where identity and homeland are continually reimagined, and one learns to inhabit the threshold between two worlds. She holds an MFA from UMass Amherst and a BFA from UA Birmingham. Khademi has been an artist in residence at MASS MoCA and Chautauqua. She was the recipient of the Lincoln Ceramics Endowment, CFWM’s ValleyCreates Grant, and the IRIS Fellowship.
