Hashem Shakeri

Hashem Shakeri is an artist, photographer and filmmaker based in Tehran. His practice focuses on Iran, Afghanistan and other countries in the region. He discovered photography as a teenager and, through years of self-directed learning and sustained practice, developed a personal visual language. Throughout his career he has favoured long-term, independent projects and visual storytelling.

Working at the intersection of socio-political tensions and environmental crises, Shakeri examines how people struggle to endure and to make life possible. Through a contemporary approach to photography and image-led narrative, he challenges dominant accounts by making visible people and places pushed to the margins: communities living through unwanted exclusion and displacement, searching for life while negotiating the forces around them. A central concern in his work is how the everyday can be activated so that its strangeness surfaces, and the extraordinary becomes visible at the heart of the ordinary.

Shakeri’s work has been widely published internationally and exhibited at major museums and festivals worldwide. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions.