Shadi Yousefian’s work engages personal and social issues of contemporary life, particularly, cultural identity and the immigrant experience. As an Iranian immigrant, her work reflects and addresses issues that touch on universal themes such as loss, dislocation, alienation, and reinvention.

In her early works, Shadi showcases her struggles with an identity crisis that she experienced after moving from Iran to the U.S. Her stylistic approach of her earlier photographic works such as Self-Portraits I and Self-Portraits II series clearly conveys her discomfort and uneasiness with this dislocation. In these earlier series, Shadi uses photography as a medium for self-expression rather than mere photographic representation in order to express the complexity of her feelings towards her subject matter. By cutting, scratching, applying glue, then printing from reassembled and manipulated negatives, she creates highly expressive pieces that speak to the viewer of her frustration with two identities to which she felt no clear sense of belonging.

Following her Self-Portraits series, she created the Universal and Examination series which also dealt with the issue of identity but this time on a more universal level. In these series, Shadi explores the idea that identity is not fixed, but rather much more fluid and dynamic. She took pictures of different people, of different genders, nationalities, and ages, and cut and manipulated the negatives, and reassembled them into “negative collages” which were then printed on canvas (in the case of Universal Identity series) or transparencies (in the case of Examination series). These images capture that fluidity of identity that depends on the viewer’s perspective and their ability to see beyond a single aspect of a person and their physical presentation. Perhaps, these two series served as a turning point in Shadi’s life as an artist and as a person, helping her to make peace with her double identity and move towards a more serene state of mind, which is apparent in her subsequent works, the Letters, Memories, and Diaries series.

Although her subject matter has not significantly changed, in these later series, she has moved from a more spontaneous expressionistic approach (as in her Self-Portraits I and II series) toward a carefully planned minimalistic and repetitive approach. In all of these series, she is presenting something extremely personal (such as letters, album pictures, and diaries) in a very universally comprehensible style using repetition and simple geometry. The process of destroying and repurposing something so precious serves as a therapeutic and meditative ritual which helps her stay present while reflecting on her past.

All of Shadi’s work to date reflects the desire to capture and distill some of the essence of her own life as an immigrant, but to also connect it to a more universal experience. Her work suggests and builds upon a kind of fragmentation and dissolution, but also the endeavor to reinvent and reconstruct a self in a new social and cultural context.