Filtered through her perspective as an Iranian-American, Polat’s practice examines history and migration– understanding how cultures shift over time, how they have landed within the American empire, and how these changes dictate her future as an American. Her practice utilizes sculpture, drawing, video, and performance to navigate the perpetual evolution of culture and identity.
Within this framework, Polat interrogates topics surrounding labor, power, patriarchy, mysticism, landscape, and extractivism. She mines her personal experiences, local histories, and global narratives, to find points where the intersections between our intimate lives and the external world are most potent. Polat incorporates used objects and ages surfaces to construct a world with a collapsed sense of time– palimpsests containing past, present, and speculative future.
Aryana Polat was raised in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, CA, where she continues to reside. She 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 graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021 with a BFA in Sculpture, and is currently a UCLA MFA candidate in Sculpture.