Venus Bayat is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator. She is a Master of Fine Arts candidate with a concentration in Photography at The Pennsylvania State University. She holds an M.A. in Mass Communication and Media Studies from Texas Tech University. Her practice spans photography, filmmaking, and poetry, exploring themes of displacement, loneliness, media culture, and digital connection. Venus has exhibited her photographs and films internationally in the U.S., India, China, and other countries. She has participated in more than 25 solo and group exhibitions around the world. She published her first poetry book in 2015 and is also an academic writer with a focus on human loneliness and media dependency. She has received multiple awards, including the 2025–2026 Sustainability Fellowship. She currently teaches Culture of Photography at Penn State and works as an art gallery assistant at the university. She also serves as the Graduate Representative on the Graduate Affairs Committee in the College of Arts and Architecture.

About the project:

Bubbles

Human connection is the missing key in our modern generation. Most people do not appear inclined to rediscover their old connections. Furthermore, many are reluctant to establish new ones, as technology has come to dominate our lives. The concept of a bubble has always held a vague interpretation for me, much like destiny, fatalism, and karma, of which nobody is aware, and this is the nature of a bubble.

In this series of photographs, I have gathered multiple images of my father and his friends from their youth. I attempted to reconstruct their friendships with elements like bubbles—a symbol of vague and complicated relationships that can no longer be referred to as friendships because my father is unaware of these friends’ current status. The ephemeral existence of these bubbles emphasizes the finite nature of the modern world.

I used bubbles on the characters’ faces because I believe that past memories were like bubbles for them—vanishing and fleeting. Bubbles serve as symbols to illustrate how memories succumb to the pressures of life while our bodies remain reminders of old traditions and youthful affinities.

~Venus Bayat