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Kiana Shahnia (b. 2000, Tehran) is an artist based in Chicago and Vancouver whose oil-on-panel paintings extend beyond the image to become objects, barriers, props, and devices that shape encounters with space. Familiar forms function as decoys, carrying subtle instructions that organize bodies and attention. Through repetition, fragmentation, and mirroring, Shahnia examines how perspectives and positions are structured, turning spectatorship into a bodily negotiation. Rather than resolving these conditions, her installations sustain their instability and explore the mechanisms that place viewers and direct them to participate.

kianash@uchicago.edu