Sofia Pashaei

Sofia Pashaei is a multidisciplinary artist from Sweden who currently lives and works in Brussels. Her practice encompasses painting, drawing, and animation, exploring how silence, displacement, and cultural hybridity influence perception and emotion. Figures in her work often appear suspended and emotionally reserved, caught in moments where meaning lingers just beyond expression. This subtle ambiguity highlights the limits of language while evoking the private inner worlds of those navigating multiple identities and geographies.

Working at the crossroads of language, memory, and identity, Pashaei creates images that delve into the emotional complexities of diasporic life. Raised in Sweden by Iranian parents, she inhabits a space between cultures where the notion of home feels both intimate and distant. In this context, the act of translation—whether linguistic or emotional—is frequently fragile and incomplete.

In 2023, Pashaei received the Kells Collection Award at the SWAB art fair in Barcelona for her solo presentation with Rafael Perez Hernando Gallery. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including at Fondation Boghossian in Brussels, The Hole and Hashimoto Contemporary in New York, and Delphian Gallery in collaboration with Unit1 in London.

As an animation director, she has collaborated with prominent clients such as The New York Times, Google, TED, and MTV. Influenced by cinematic framing, Pashaei composes her scenes with careful restraint, suggesting narratives that remain partially concealed. Her imagery is defined by stillness, tension, and open-endedness, inviting viewers into spaces where memory endures and questions of belonging arise. Through her work, she traces the fragile resilience of diasporic existence, emphasizing the quiet yet profound complexities of living across languages, cultures, and homes.