ARTIST STATEMENT
Kamran Samimi’s interdisciplinary practice explores the material and spiritual dimensions of nature as expressions of time and place. Informed by his Iranian-Norwegian heritage and upbringing in rural Hawai‘i, his work reflects a life lived between worlds, shaped by multiple geographies and cosmologies. His practice evokes early memories of volcanic eruptions, landslides, tsunamis, and morning mist—moments that reveal nature’s power to both create and transform.
Influenced by Zen and Sufi philosophies, Samimi approaches nature as a collaborator rather than a subject, allowing the slow processes of erosion and renewal to guide his hand. He as a particular affinity for stone, as it invites him into a timeless space of pure being, beyond human notions of beauty and brutality. Stone serves as both material and guide—a wayfinding device through which he seeks a sense of belonging and community: a of home within the ever-changing landscape of this world.
His gestures follow the rhythms of erosion and renewal, inviting moments of pause and reflection. Through the poetics of process, his work becomes a meditation on displacement and mortality—not as ruptures to be resolved, but as a physical sites in which grace and equilibrium can be found.
Kamran is represented by The Third Line (Middle East / North Africa) and re.riddle (San Francisco Bay Area)
Photo by Micheal Young
BIO
Kamran Samimi grew up in rural Laupāhoehoe on Hawaiʻi Island to parents of Iranian and Norwegian ancestry. He has been exhibiting art since 2008, and has had solo exhibitions at The Third Line, Dubai, the Sharjah Art Museum in United Arab Emirates, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design.
His work is in the permanent collection of Michelle and Barack Obama, Mohammad Afkhami, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, and the Hawai’i State Foundation of Culture and the Arts. Samimi was the recipient of the 2024 Artists of Hawai’i Best In Show Award and holds an BFA in Printmaking and an MFA in Print Media and Sculpture from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He has gallery representation by The Third Line in Dubai and re.riddle in San Francisco.