Alinah Azadeh is a British-Iranian artist, based in the UK

Alinah Azadeh is a British-Iranian artist with a background in painting, new media and video. Since her MA in Media Arts Practice at Westminster University (2001), she has created installations that combine textile media with texts and networked technology.

Collaboration and mass participation are central to her work, either with other practitioners or the audience itself.

Her highly interactive works present the public with opportunities for self-reflection and an emotive dialogue with each other. She is interested in the poetic within everyday life and the use of ancient practices such as gift-giving, Moshaereh (communal poetry reciting) and bibliomancy to inspire socially driven artworks.

‘The Loom: from text to textile’, (2005) was a project with ASF Weave and computer scientist/curator Jon Bird (Sussex University). This involved highlighting relationships to life and death via the computer-mediated weaving of a 20-metre textile, involving hundreds of people from across the globe.

‘Mother to Mother’ (2006) is an online, participatory ‘Garden of Values’, which grew out of dialogue and weaving workshops with other mothers. Both this and The Loom’ were inspired by Alinah’s own mother who died in the Asian Tsunami just after her first child was born. These events have become a creative force in her life and her practice, opening up new questions around life, death and the transmission of cultural values.

Crafting Space (2008) was the first ever-interactive commission by the Crafts Council for Origin: the London Craft Fair. This live textile installation invited visitors to Origin to engage in the hands-on writing and weaving of a monumental textile sculpture. The intention was to transform visitor’s perceptions of what it means to be engaged in craft. The textile structure was designed in collaboration with sculptor Willow Winston.

The Bibliomancer’s Dream (2009) was an interactive installation for Southbank Centre, which took the form of a circular set of giant bookshelves, stocked with inspirational literature and attached to giant scrolls and writing desks. With inspired design engineering by Willow Winston and Terence Williams, the project invited visitors to make playful use of the ancient ritual of bibliomancy (the art of divining with books) to create a collective poetic text contributed to by thousands of members of the public over four weeks. Commissioned as part of the Imagine Festival.

Alinah Azadeh
Artist, mother, human being.