Zahra Salarnia

About

Zahra Salarnia is an artist and educator based in New Zealand. She holds a BA in Film and Animation and an MPhil in Art and Design. For over a decade, she has worked as a visual effects artist and educator. Her research practice focuses on expanded animation, exploring alternative and unconventional methods for creating and presenting animation. She examines how animation spaces provoke different modes of viewing and understanding animations. Her works combine both analogue and digital techniques, synthesizing her technical VFX experiences with her passion for visual art, especially drawing.

Current Research

Films

No. 28

The film depicts the director’s childhood memories. Without a linear narrative structure, the interplay between discrete pictures reveals the memory of innocent childhood life in a remote, peaceful environment against the surrounding political affairs of post-revolutionary Iran.

Kisses of the Wind embodies the director’s sensory experiences of the Port Waikato dunes in New Zealand through a series of digitally edited still photographs and sound. As the images of sand patterns transform into one another, they create an illusion of movement that echoes the rhythm of ocean waves. In this liminal space, between stillness and motion, sand and sea, the film suspends fixed boundaries, allowing new forms and meanings to emerge.

The smell of an oil lamp

This is the story of a remarkable woman who was close to me, battling her way through the challenges of life.

Installations

No. 28 is the multichannel animated installation of fragmentary and fading remains of my childhood memory with no narrative structure. The textural and temporal quality of my memory space is embodied through the materiality of charcoal drawings, the temporal rhythm of animation, and the installation space.

I’m reconstructing my nanie’s mud house from memory. With the help of VR glasses, I hope to immerse myself once more in the place that vanished many years ago.