| a brief introduction |
A big brutalist structure rises in a remote Arctic landscape. Red spheres hover mysteriously amidst the forest. A single tiny red cubicle stands surrounded by thousands of dark cubicles in a vast structural expanse. Walls, corners, dark stairways, and acid-burned self-portraits emerge—a visual language that reflects an endless search for identity and self. This is the journey that drives Aljoscha Farassat’s art.
Aljoscha Farassat is an Austrian-born painter who has lived and worked in New York City since 2008.
Born stateless, Farassat’s earliest experience of life was defined by not belonging. His mother is Austrian, his father Iranian, who himself struggled with the loss of national identity after being exiled following the Islamic Revolution in 1978.
For the first seventeen years of his life, Farassat had no citizenship, no passport, no official way to travel or leave the country he was not officially a part of. In that sense, he was neither native nor immigrant. His difference was also visible—physically, culturally, existentially—reinforcing a daily sense of not belonging.
At seventeen, after legal battles, Austria was compelled to adopt him, but by then, the experience of not belonging had become his defining identity—his own form of exile.
“The responsibility in my creative endeavors is to pose a question not to answer one”
This sense of displacement became a fertile ground for creativity. Unbound by national pride, heritage, or societal intolerance, Farassat discovered the freedom to explore without limitations.
At twenty-eight, he moved to New York City—a place where not belonging paradoxically means belonging. Here, the outsider finds a home, and the search for self becomes universal. Here not belonging means to belong.