Milad Saadat

Milad Saadat, born in 1997 in Ardabil, began his artistic practice in 2016 by participating in photography workshops and classes, later taking part in group photography exhibitions. He then expanded his artistic and professional practice into literature and theatre while studying Dramatic Literature at Shiraz University of Arts and continuing his education in Tehran. During this period, he explored different aspects of theatre through stage management, assistant directing, and directing. In literature, he engaged in writing and translating plays and short stories, and for a period, served as the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Sāyeh. This movement between different artistic disciplines did not constitute a rupture in his practice. Rather, his background in literature and theatre connected his approach to the image with the concepts of story and narrative. In his photographic series, Milad Saadat depicts people within urban and natural environments. These spaces are not merely backgrounds, but integral parts of the narratives of the people within the images. Working with a minimalist approach, he brings together human movement, light, color, texture, lines, and empty space to create images situated at the boundaries between presence and absence, stillness and movement, clarity and ambiguity. Many of these images are built around visual shifts, perceptual errors, and traces of movement: moments that move reality away from certainty and allow the viewer to move between the image, memory, imagination, and visual illusion, reconstructing what may have occurred before the frame or what may continue beyond it. This connection between photography, literature, theatre, and translation has shaped him as an interdisciplinary artist, with “narrative” at the center of his artistic practice.