Aryana Polat is a multidisciplinary artist whose work moves through sculpture, video, and performance. Filtered through her lens as an Iranian-American, Polat dissects our current practice of extractive capitalism- and its global spread via American hegemony- observing the ways it has affected the body, Earth, and its natural resources. Polat mines her personal history, paralleling it with these larger systems as a means of uncovering and understanding the interconnected nature between our intimate lives and these political and economic schemas. She is invested in using art to preserve her family and cultural history, while simultaneously observing the ways she is losing her spiritual connections, culture, mother tongue, and, with the loss of more generations, a tether to her origins- a direct result of American hegemony. Polat is interested in the contradictory as a reflection between forces; where the exploitative meets the liberatory, the opulent meets the deprived, and where the tangible meets the ephemeral.
Polat was a 2022 Franconia Sculpture Park Emerging Artist in Residence, and was nominated to attend the Yale: Norfolk School of Art summer residency in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout Los Angeles, New England, and online. She is currently based in her hometown of Los Angeles, CA, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021 with a BFA in Sculpture.