Interview | Ali Banisadr on Hearing Paintings: Synesthesia, Memory & the Temple of the Mind

In this episode, Leyla sits down with Ali Banisadr, the Tehran-born, New York–based painter whose work hangs in museum collections around the world. His exhibition Temple of the Mind at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (on view through November 8, 2026) is the museum's first-ever artist intervention in its collection. Ali's paintings are hung throughout the galleries in conversation with Gorky, Rothko, Bacon, Max Ernst, Chadwick and Giacometti, and the show ends with his largest painting, Return to Mother, beside a Rothko.

Ali explains how the show came about. He talks about the Hemicycle Gallery he filled with works pulled from the museum's storage, along with pages from his notebooks and the five records he listens to in his studio. He also explains the title Return to Mother, which comes from ama-gi, the ancient Sumerian word for freedom.

Then the conversation goes back to Ali's childhood in Tehran during the Iran–Iraq War, when he experienced the air raids mostly as sound and vibration from the basement and made drawings of whole worlds to understand them. Years later, in art school in New York, his teachers noticed how often he described his paintings in terms of sound. That's how he learned the word for what he'd always had: synesthesia. He hears images and sees music, and he paints by tuning the "notes" of a canvas until they become an orchestra.

Ali also talks about arriving in San Diego at twelve with no English, finding belonging in mid-'90s hip hop and San Francisco graffiti culture, and the Greyhound trip to New York that convinced him to become an artist. He talks about his mother, a psychologist who introduced him to Jung and archetypes, and his grandmother, a poet who read him Hafez and Rumi. He says the structure of Persian Sufi poetry, with its metaphor, concealment and slow revelation, is still how he thinks about every painting.

Along the way, he shares the four pillars behind all his work (personal history, art history, current events and the cosmos), his two-notebook research practice, meditation and Kepler's "music of the spheres," and why he thinks of his paintings as Trojan horses that keep opening long after you walk away. He closes with a line about what an Iranian American artist can be: someone who carries Iran and the whole history of images, making work from the place where they meet and transform one another.

See Temple of the Mind at Buffalo AKG (through Nov 8, 2026): https://buffaloakg.org
Talisman: Carte Blanche to Ali Banisadr, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris (through Nov 7, 2026): https://ropac.net/news/3072-talisman-carte-blanche-to-ali-banisadr/
Talisman at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais (through Oct 10, 2026): https://ropac.net/exhibitions/801-ali-banisadr-talisman/
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tA5iG-lKxXk
Ali's website: https://alibanisadr.com