Leila Pazooki was born in Tehran in 1977 and studied painting at the Art Academy in Tehran. After moving to Germany in 2002, she studied Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and completed a Masters in Art In Context at Berlin University of Arts in 2009.
She has exhibited internationally, with solo shows in Dubai, Mexico City and Tehran. Pazooki has participated in a number of group shows including in Berlin, London, New York and Guangzhou, China, along with the touring exhibition Persian Vision that moved throughout the US in 2007. Also that year, the artist conceived and realised an interdisciplinary project entitled I’m Longing and I Don’t Know For What. This brought together 17 artists from Berlin and Tehran to examine the exchange of art between East and West.
Pazooki’s work explores the aesthetics of context. She questions the creative force that working within and transcending certain moral, religious or ideological frameworks can have. She uncovers the nature of this transcendence, how the magnitude of transgressions is so often entrenched in the context of where a person lives or where they are from. There is often a sense of confrontation in her encounters, which each document and explore the complexities of place.