Omid Asadi
Contrast and contradiction are central to my practice. I am interested in what happens when opposing materials, ideas, histories and experiences are brought together and allowed to coexist without being resolved. Through these tensions, I explore memory, displacement, loss, belonging and our relationship with places that change, disappear or continue to exist through memory.
I work across installation, sculpture, performance and other media, choosing materials and methods according to what each work demands rather than following a fixed visual language. My process is led by the relationship between idea and material, allowing work to develop through experimentation, testing and response.
Materials are important not only for their physical qualities but for the histories, associations and memories they carry. I often bring together elements that appear incompatible: fragile and solid, familiar and unfamiliar, permanent and temporary, attraction and discomfort, presence and absence. These contrasts create conditions of tension and instability through which different meanings can emerge.
Space and the viewer’s physical experience are equally important. Rather than directly representing memory or displacement, I am interested in creating environments where these ideas can be encountered through movement, proximity, material and sensory experience. Increasingly, I am exploring how elements beyond the visual, including sound and scent, can extend these experiences.
I see contradiction not as something that needs to be resolved, but as a productive space where multiple realities can exist simultaneously. This allows my work to hold complexity and uncertainty while remaining open to different experiences and interpretations.
Lived Experience
My practice is shaped by moving through distinct and often conflicting systems. I grew up in post-revolution Iran during the Iran–Iraq War, later studied fluid mechanics and worked in the oil industry before migrating to the UK and eventually becoming an artist.
Growing up in a place affected by war gave me an early experience of how environments that appear permanent can suddenly become unstable, damaged or disappear. Migration later changed my relationship with home, belonging and memory again, creating a distance between places as they are remembered and how they continue to exist, change or disappear without us.
My background in fluid mechanics and the oil industry has also influenced how I understand materials and physical relationships. Ideas of force, pressure, resistance and structural behaviour have become part of how I think through making, not simply as metaphors but as ways of organising materials and space.
These different experiences come together in my work without being directly illustrated. Personal and political histories are embedded within material choices, spatial relationships and the tensions between elements. They have shaped my interest in displacement, instability and the disappearance of lived spaces, but also my tendency to hold contradictory experiences together rather than resolve them into a single narrative or identity.
Join Axis
We support artists
Funding, visibility, connection and practical help.
Membership includes £15 million of Public Liability Insurance!