Madihe Gharibi (b.1995, Iran) is a playwright and artist based in Oslo, Norway. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Dramatic Literature from the University of Tehran and has completed a Master's program in Fine Art at the Art Academy of Bergen in spring 2021.

Gharibi had worked as a playwright and theatre director in Iran. Alongside her own praxis, she had been involved in numerous teaching projects aimed at training young professionals and teenagers in writing and theatre. She established a theater group for teenagers in Iran whereby they were being educated in how to develop their personal everyday concerns into a coherent play and further learn to perform their ideas (Do not cut my voice).

Gharibi’s practice is based on time-based and live art. It can be experienced from a gallery, theater stage, to conversations over a movie. Her practice is intertwined and interconnected with her everyday life and her ontological view of different phenomena. Through her practice, she fosters a deliberate exchange between her art and her lived experiences until a fragile and blur boundary between reality and fiction can be drawn. Her time-based approach is chosen as it shares similarities to the unique living experiences. 

“My work is my dreams”. Her anxieties, fears, and sorrows are mirrored in her work. The language of this dream is storytelling.  Storytelling, in the sense, is a technique through which her emotions are expressed. These emotions can be derived from her personal life, as well as the socio-political circumstances that she experiences. The stories, solely by themselves, are discovered within the living experiences of ‘ordinary people’; The voiceless class of society. 

These stories could be news that has touched her (At the door that has no knocker), her own experience as an immigrant (Mother, Land, and Motherland; Dual homeness), An ethical dilemma her friend was faced (It’s all on the mosquitoes). 

Gharibi’s work has also been a platform for untold voices and their stories to be heard. The narrators of these untold voices include non-artists whose lived experiences are significant to be heard. The first group, in this respect, that she has initially chosen was Iranian teenagers; subjects who do not possess an adequate space to be expressed. The second group is the Iranian women who have been seeking asylum in Norway for many years. The latter is the latest project that she is currently working on.

In her way of narrating, Gharibi strives to employ the concept of “othering”. This translates into manipulating the contexts to experiment how ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ are differently constructed (The others: a series of film screening).