Parastou Haghi was born in 1985, Rasht. She got her BA in painting from Tehran University of Fine Arts in 2009, and her MA in art and media from the University of Montreal, Canada, in 2016. Haghi has participated in numerous domestic and foreign exhibitions.

The present series depict the face of the people that are captive to their destructive selves. These are people whom I deal with every day: I talk to them, becoming one of them myself. These are portraits of anxious and terrified people that are overcome by their own mediocre and ignoble needs. The people of my paintings see themselves as lowly and inferior, and even though they are caught up in the web of this world, and increasingly so by the hour, they do not do anything to set themselves loose, for they have nothing else to offer but this anxious and terrified gaze. They are incapable of smiling and are wallowing in a doleful pleasure, witnessing the earth destroyed by their (our) own hands—and it is destroying us. All we city-people are prisoners of this world and captives to the gray-lands, overwhelmed by the absurdity of our everyday lives.
Parastou Haghi
2016