Aryana Polat is an Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist, mainly working with sculpture, video, and performance. Her practice investigates the branches of extractive capitalism through her diasporic lens. Polat examines the military industrial complex, exploitation of bodies and natural resources, and the (de)spiritualised contexts of our globalized world. She is interested in the contradictory as a meeting point between these forces; where the exploitative meets the liberatory, the opulent meets the deprived, and where the tangible meets the ephemeral. Operating through these facets of extractive capitalism allows her to explore the ways they affect our environments, and in turn, us. There is a loss of spirituality as a result of the infrastructures and superstructures that neoliberalism and extractivism have placed on our lives. Polat wants to reveal the sublime that prevails in spite of these realities.
Polat is a 2022 Franconia Sculpture Park Emerging Artist 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.