Heja Rahiminia (b. 1986, Marivan, Kurdistan) is a Kurdish artist from Iran, currently based in London. He holds a BA in Photography from the University of Art, Isfahan, Iran, and is currently completing the final year of the three-year postgraduate programme in Contemporary Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools, London.

Heja’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses photography, video, installation, sculpture and printmaking. His work explores migration, borders, systems of control, censorship, statelessness, colonialism and decolonisation. Working with images, objects, materials and archival sources, he examines how identities, histories and forms of belonging are shaped, divided, concealed or erased.

Born and raised in the border city of Marivan, between Iranian Kurdistan and Iraq, Rahiminia’s practice is informed by the border as both a lived experience and a political structure. Questions of displacement, war, repression and the division of land have remained central to his artistic inquiry.

For many years, Heja worked through documentary and fine-art photography, developing an extensive archive of portraits and other images made in Kurdistan/Rojhelat between 2005 and 2019, as well as photographs and material gathered during his years living in Isfahan and Tehran. Since moving to the UK in 2021, his practice has gradually expanded beyond the conventional photographic image, bringing photography into dialogue with installation, sculpture, video, sound and printmaking. The photographic image and his personal archive remain important materials through which he investigates the mechanisms of visibility, concealment, exclusion and historical erasure.

Heja left Iran in 2019 and came to the UK in 2021. He was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools in 2024 with a full scholarship.