Artist Statement

Formed from love and distance, My Heart is Tight For You reflects Mahsa Attaran’s ongoing meditations on family, home, and language shaped by life apart from Iran. Rooted in love—for her homeland, her family, and the quiet strength of women’s labor; Attaran’s practice honors care and resilience while confronting systems of power. Working across photography, video, and handmade forms, she treats making with her hands as both an intimate act and a political gesture.

At the heart of her work lies a commitment to women’s rights and the critique of patriarchal structures. In recent works, she turns to language to deepen these inquiries, tracing how meaning and identity shift across borders and translation. Persian, her mother tongue, carries its own rhythm and emotional depth, often resisting translation. These untranslatable moments mirror the complexities of living between cultures, where meaning and memory slip between languages.

For Attaran, art is both resistance and devotion, a space to hold grief and love side by side, to critique through care, and to transform intimacy into testimony. Her work insists quietly yet powerfully: I am here. See me. Hear me.
 

Biography

Mahsa Attaran is an Iranian-born visual artist and photographer whose work navigates culture, identity, and feminism. A self-taught photographer in both fine art and advertising, she works across multimedia and has exhibited internationally, including at the Iranian Artists Forum, Iranian Art Museum, and Windsor Art Center. Featured in Hyperallergic, Attaran has taught and mentored over 500 students worldwide. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Connecticut and is a faculty member in the Visual Arts Department at The Loomis Chaffee School.
 

Website: mahsaattaran.com