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Shirana Shahbazi is widely thought of purely as a photographer. This definition is unsurprising given that the source of her imagery will always appear in her camera's viewfinder in the first instance, but also because she is a master of the medium. When viewed on gallery walls and in publications her work is breathtakingly beautiful; vibrant with depth and colour, precise and controlled yet simultaneously elegant and light. However, it would be just as true to see Shahbazi as a designer and editor. By which I not only refer to the process of transformation she puts her photographs through: printed on a variety of materials such as paper – photographic or poster – as well as textiles; made into a painting – on a wall or canvas – or sometimes carpet, by the Iranian artisans with whom she collaborates. Shahbazi's talents as designer and editor come into play as much in her numerous publications as in the unique way in which individual pieces are laid out on the gallery wall. There is something in her method akin to the art of book design, the visitor virtually turning over from one 'spread' to another, building up a visual library while progressing along the space. It is an experience consolidated by the airy generosity of her hangs, which hover somewhere between the salon arrangement and the linear display of the modern art museum. And while there is no explicit narrative nor physical direction in which to view Shahbazi's shows, each image is clearly in dialogue with its neighbours, gently allowing the individual pieces to cumulatively create one poetic assemblage ...

For the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6)  the artist has made a two-part contribution: one is a wall installation comprising eleven images at either end of which appears a vast still-life painting, 6 by 10 metres in size. One of these paintings depicts three human skulls on a black background. The skulls are in varying degrees of decomposition: with or without a bottom jaw, missing teeth, and so on. As if one skull were not a powerful enough image – a constant reminder of human mortality as depicted in the memento mori paintings of seventeenth-century Europe – the artist presents us with a triple dose of vanitas. This classical genre of still-life painting acted as a reminder of the brevity of physical life through symbolic elements such as timepieces, candles, dead animals and skulls ...

Much has been made of Shahbazi's personal history; born in Tehran, she moved to Germany with her family at the age of eleven and has lived in Zurich since 1997. And while it is irrefutable that she is a product of these different cultures, reading her work through her biography would be reductive and limiting. More relevant are the artist's incessant travels around the globe, which allow her to make the suggestively powerful connections between different people and places that make her work so singular ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2009 issue.