While looking at his painting on images he had taken with his cellphone, Bashir noticed that his works looked approximately the same, but that some qualities and details were lost in the digital reproduction. It led to a further question: what is the best space for displaying a painting?

Bashir works from digital images he creates and then projects onto a canvas to paint. In his process of translation, even transposition, Bashir enacts artist and critic Hito Steyerl’s concept of ‘the poor image’ which she described in her essay ‘In Defense of the Poor Image,’ as “host of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.”

Untitled, from the artist’s ‘Third Space’ series, borrows the graphics of the early internet and even video games with its pixelated forms and gradated colors that recalls Microsoft’s Word Art feature and the early bitmap drawing programs used in the 1990s. Even when painting, Bashir incorporates technology of a kind: projectors, laser-cut stencils, and airbrushes.

Bashir is also interested in the idea of frames: his works are primarily ‘landscapes’ collaged of various elements; there is a relation between the pictorial space and its context, and a contrast between non-existent digital space and the illusion of depth captured in his canvases. There is also the three-dimensional space in which the painting itself is situated. As Steyerl writes, poor images tend towards abstraction and “[the] poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities…In short: it is about reality."

Bashir has exhibited widely in Tehran, Dubai, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York. He has a BA in Visual Arts from Farhangian University in Tehran.