Born in 1984 in Azerbaidjan, Shachnaz Aghayeva lives and works between Bakou and Istanbul. An innate underground energy innervates her practice. She is joyfully visceral, subtly sensual, sometimes even vile eruptive. On the surface of her graphic works, like in her sculptures and performances, a same trend twists the surface, animates the figures and represents the form. Always experimenting new processes and new materials( metal, linoleum, wood, glas, cardboard..), Sachnaz defines herself as a woman artist. Both a woman and an artist who questions the female condition. She aims to show the entire female world as a kind of protest act. Assuming that the perception of women in our societies, and especially in Eastern cultures, is dominated by a male gaze and does not reflect the reality, when not false, she aims to reveal that part of female society that only women know about. Women bring up and influence the life of other women, reproducing a model, including wounds that may provoke self-deception. A reality totally ignored by men. By confronting preconceptions of the male gaze on gender to the viewer, the artist purpose is to influence the future formation of the female perception by women themselves and by humanity as a whole. To push the aesthetic framework of the concept of femininity in a traditional society.
Shachnaz represents exclusively women, with recurrent patterns such as long hair, a mythological symbol, that represents the female attempt to organize her own life through intimate care; protuberant chest with red heads like those drawn by Louise Bourgeois. Between abstraction and figuration, the stylized images of nude women are classical in her composition, but manipulation of scale and perspective reflects women's changing identity and sexual freedom as society shifts and and adapts to contemporary gender identities.
Shahnaz also has pedagogical experience working with children with both physical and psychological problems. In 2013, she founded the ” Masterkids”, an art club for children on a charitable basis.