Hoda Zarbaf passed away suddenly at the height of the pandemic—a great loss, which the art world has not yet had the chance to mourn. The Bridge and Tunnel is proud to be a part of this international effort to honor her memory and celebrate her art on the anniversary of her passing.

Zarbaf was an Iranian-Canadian artist, who produced over 50 multimedia sculptures, compositions and installations during her short-yet-significant career. Her work has been showcased in art galleries and museums such as the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. An introspective artist, Zarbaf’s interdisciplinary practice revolved around memory and nostalgia. She brought together discarded, forgotten—and seemingly useless—domestic objects, fusing them with newly formed ceramics, lights, sounds, videos, or patchwork elements to sculpt the irretrievable loss, the never returning past.

In Front Camera/Back Camera, true to form, Zarbaf introspectively confronts her existential agony, recording the memory of her internal conflict. Made in 2017 as part of the We Are Image-making Machines series, the piece features two projections of the artist and her thoughts. It reveals Zarbaf’s state of “self” reflection versed by the gaze of her ego. Together, the two unfeigned projections exhibit a rather harrowing conversation between the self as “I,” the subjective knower, and the self as “Me,” the known object.