Bijan Rafaty was born in Tehran, Iran, where he received his formal education up to be a B.A in economics and political science. He moved to U.S.A. for the completion of his studies where he received M.ED., M.A. and PH.D. in economics. He worked in places like the Center for Advanced Studies in Population and Energy and International Monetary Fund and taught part time at Howard University. 

As an artist he is considered as a self-taught one and his trajectory in art may be considered more as a spiral than a straight line. He is a multi media artist who for the past twenty five years has put together fifteen solo shows and participated in almost thirty group and private exhibitions. His work has been kept in private collections in the U.S.A, UK, France, Germany, Netherland, Japan, Brazil, Uruguay and Iran.

Excerpts taken from critics and his interviews indicate that the unconscious mind plays an important part in his paintings, sculptures and installations, whereas he himself emphasizes that his arts is founded on a conceptual basis.

Bijan has also tried his hand at music and poetry, but he considers visual art as the elixir of life.

Artist's Statement
In the contextual format of language in relation to art, i pick Joseph Kosuth's dictium "art as idea as idea" in distinction to ad reinhard's " Art as art and nothing but art ". The question is the magic or where the magic resides: in the absolute-truth-or in it's intermediaries-falsity? Where as the contradiction between truth and falsity ends up in the phrases like this one "truth is image, but there is no image of truth".

What role image-any sign system, inscription, picture, or any other mediation in comprehension, gesture, presentation of something else-can play in our ever changing life patterns and how it refers to a priori perception and intention have remained widely open.

My preferences for Kosuth's dictum is firstly because it allows us, i think to overcome essentialism and also open up the way for relational and differetial discourses; secondly and most importantly, it leads us to a general understanding of the exicting gap between art theory and practice. This latter one simply can be observed when a priori intention transforms into an art object, project, or an image. Again these disorders. mystical changes and permutations which occur between conceptual modes of denunciation and an accomplished art project can vividly be seen in Sol Lewitt's art practices and his related statements.

But as to context textual temporality of our life we see ourselves being confronted with great duality. An Apollonian, Dionysian duality which have been extended over ages in to the duality of sublime-beauty, art-science, reason-intuition, mind-body Etc. In the binary epistemological structure of knowledge Wintgenstein is the one who stated " … and only within this system does each particle attain the value we attribute to it ".

Mainly artists are rejecting these logical positivism and even artists like John Latham considered intuitive reasoning in juxtapositions of temporal, exprimental contextual modes of understanding, But this of course goes against hierarchical epistemolugies and it's concrete and spatial methphors.

By far it seems no thought or idea exist without it's contextual support. And it might be that the conseptual bases expressed by art works stand prior to the concrete forms it may acquire. If we agree with " any language as a privileged sign system that no concept theory can adequately capture in it's totality" we better appreciate Duchamp's insight. He, in the early part of the last century reflected artist as someone who reconsiders the world and recomposes meaning through language rather than someone who handicrafts a visual object for " retinal pleasure".

From perspective to surface, today's art dialogues mainly are reviewed in lieu of artist role as a social surveyor explorer of dynamic interrelation of physical, biological and political functions of a social system.