Ashkan Sahihi was born in Tehran in 1963 and grew up in Germany. He moved to New York in the spring of 1987. For him, like for others of his generation, the city offered more than just refuge and protection; it was the pure embodiment of progress and opportunity. Working for notable magazines such as ZEIT Magazin, the New Yorker, and Vogue, Sahihi portrayed the city and its faces. A collection of 224 of his portraits from The New York Years will be published by DISTANZ in September, 2020.

After turning his focus to conceptual series in the late 1990’s, Sahihi had exhibitions at MoMA/PS1/New York, Macro/Rome, the Akademie der Künste/Berlin, and the Andrea Rosen Gallery/New York, showing amongst others the most well-known of his early series, Drugs.

Living in New York, Istanbul, and London in the early 2000’s, Sahihi’s work continuously attempted to engage the political discourse he deems lacking in substance. Drawing on familiar visual languages but employing them in unexpected ways, he challenges the viewer’s and subject’s comfort level as well as his own.

Since 2013, he has lived and worked in Berlin. His most extensive work to date, Die Berlinerin (published in 2015), is a photographic-sociological study of women in the city, inspired by Clifford Geertz’ method of thick description.

Living in Berlin, he encountered young, gay men that struck him as oddly familiar. They reminded him of New York in the 1980s, and of the search for new forms of identity. It seemed as if Berlin of the 2010s had replaced the old New York, where HIV/AIDS shattered Sahihi’s diverse and international community, as the city of dreams.

But even in Berlin, so cosmopolitan and liberal, political powers are growing in influence that exert pressure on people whose lives do not fit into a narrow ideological framework. With equal rights and social equality not yet achieved, it looks as though already won freedoms will have to be defended.

One of Sahihi’s latest series, Beautiful Berlin Boys, is thus not only a tribute to friends from earlier days; it also takes a stand for life in openness and liberty, for belonging and tolerance – individual and unconditional, that is equally echoed in the portraits of American Drag Queen and performance artist Christeene Sahihi contributed for German Interview in early 2020.

A different approach to tolerance and questions of belonging was taken in Sahihi’s large scale work Last Supper Weserstr., on display in Neukölln’s Weserhalle in spring, 2019. Gathering a group of friends and acquaintances from the neighborhood, he reenacted da Vinci’s famous mural painting, thus not only encouraging reflection on the motif and the cultural notions related to it, but actively bringing his own community together.