ARTIST STATEMENT
Kamran Samimi’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the ontological and cultural dimensions of natural ephemera—stone, wood, pigment, and land—as material agents in the negotiation of identity, time, and place. Informed by his Iranian-Norwegian heritage and upbringing in rural Hawai‘i, Samimi’s work emerges from a lifelong sense of in-betweenness—never fully belonging, yet deeply shaped by multiple geographies, languages, and cosmologies. His practice navigates the quiet complexities of diasporic subjectivity and ecological interdependence, seeking continuity in what is often fragmented.
Stone, a recurring element in his work, serves less as material than as a philosophical companion—embodying geological time, impermanence, and resilience. Attuned to Zen Buddhist and Sufi cosmologies that embrace transience, stillness, and non-duality, Samimi engages nature not as backdrop but as collaborator. His gestures follow the rhythms of erosion and renewal, inviting moments of pause and reflection. Through this poetics of process, his work becomes a meditation on displacement, suffering, and mortality—not as ruptures to be resolved, but as conditions through which grace, equilibrium, and healing might arise.
Kamran is represented by The Third Line (Middle East / North Africa) and re.riddle (San Francisco Bay Area)
Photo by Joey Trisolini
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.