Saman Oskouei (born 1985) and Sasan Oskouei (born 1991) are multidisciplinary artists and brothers from Tabriz, Iran, currently based in Queens, New York. Their collaborative practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, interventions, video, and photography. Their work explores how structures, materials, and spaces carry political, social, and emotional meanings, often using familiar forms to question systems of control, belonging, and authority.

Their practice developed out of working in public spaces at a young age, in an environment where visibility carried risk and expression required restraint. Growing up in Tabriz, Iran, they learned how meaning can circulate through simple gestures, how form can speak without explanation, and how space itself can become a site of negotiation. These conditions shaped a way of working that values clarity, economy, and attentiveness to context.

Saman and Sasan began their art practice in the streets of Tabriz in the 2000s under the name Icy & Sot. Their early work combined their interest in skateboarding and street culture with stencil-based street art, addressing social and humanitarian issues in an environment with limited tolerance for freedom of thought and expression.

After migrating to the United States in 2012, their practice shifted from the immediacy of the street toward installation and sculpture, while the underlying concerns remained. They continue to work with familiar structures, architectural forms, industrial materials, and symbols of order, not to reinforce their function, but to expose the systems and assumptions embedded within them. Walls, fences, and frameworks appear not simply as obstacles, but as forms whose authority can be altered, opened, or quietly undone.

Material is central to their inquiry. Steel, wood, concrete, earth, and organic elements carry social and political histories of their own. By altering scale, transparency, or placement, they allow these materials to operate differently, revealing how systems of control, labor, memory, and belonging are sustained through habit and expectation. Nature increasingly enters the work as a temporal force, introducing growth, decay, and unpredictability into constructed systems.

Rather than staging moments of rupture, their work focuses on persistence: the slow pressure of change and the possibility that even rigid structures contain openings.

Their work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Petit Palais in Paris, Museum of Fine Arts in Calais, Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) in Munich, Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in Mesa, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and Pori Art Museum in Finland. Their public projects have been presented at Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park and Times Square Arts in New York, as well as other public sites internationally.