Maral Otte is an interdisciplinary artist and violinist born in Tehran in 2001. Trained in classical violin at the Tehran Conservatory and graduating top of her class in Music at Yaşar University İzmir, she now studies contemporary art at the HFBK Hamburg — moving between sound, sculpture, video, and materials like stained glass, wood, and clay. Her work, rooted in rhythm, light, and storytelling, has been shown internationally, including at THE BODY LANGUAGE 2025 in Venice. Alongside her artistic practice, she is the founder of Gelbfenster, a Hamburg-based jewelry brand built on one
Untitled
glass sculptures, 2026
Composed of vibrant orange, yellow, and red glass, this piece draws directly from the architectural heritage of traditional Persian Orosi windows, where these warm hues dominate. Here, the artist restricts her formal language to interlocking square shapes. When sunlight strikes the warm tones, it casts shifting, multi-dimensional reflections across the ground. The work is an exploration of nostalgia — a physical reconstruction of the safe architectural spaces of her childhood, mapped out through geometric light.
Fragments of Light
Three glass sculptures, 2026
Created in 2026, Fragments of Light emerged from a period of political crisis, massacre, and total digital blackout in Iran. For the artist, working with glass became a way of processing the psychological distance between everyday life abroad and the violence unfolding in her homeland. Drawing from childhood memories of Persian windows, where colored glass transformed sunlight into shifting fields of light and shadow, the three sculptures explore, nostalgia, fragility, instability in stability, and the desire to pause time. Through the interaction of light and glass, memory becomes visible—a temporary space for reflection, calm, and emotional survival.
Duality
glass sculptures, 2026
While the first two pieces seek to create calm, this final sculpture, Duality, confronts the painful reality of the crisis. Made from green glass, the sculpture features two screaming faces, bound by a heavy chain around the neck. This does not represent two different people; it represents the psychological split that the artist, and so many Iranians outside of Iran, live through daily.
On one side is the normal, routine life that must be performed in Western society or school. On the other side is the internal horror, panic, and grief brought on by news of the massacres back home. The green glass represents extreme emotional and physical fragility. The chain around the neck embodies the suffocating feeling of being unable to breathe, of being utterly stuck. It is a monument to a collective, fractured mental state.
"Art begins with attention: to light, to sound, to material, to the atmosphere of a moment — and to the subtle ways these shape how we perceive. This work lives in the space between the physical and the emotional, asking how ordinary materials can hold memory, build atmosphere, and quietly change how a moment is experienced."
_ Maral Otte
