Artist Shora Dehnavi’s first encounter with packaging design resulted in a collaboration with Alexandre Bonnet, where luxury champagne is packaged in ‘rowdy’ graffiti. As a mural painter who works at a large scale, Shora considers working instead on a small scale and using the various materials and unique properties of packaging as an exciting bit of scientific knowledge.

When you come across champagne packaging covered in graffiti, placed among the other luxury items in their sober black packaging, heavy with gold detail, it is pretty much impossible not to stop and look. And only those fortunate enough to have encountered the artist Shora Dehnavi and her collaboration on Alexandre Bonnet’s champagne packaging can attest that it blazes with dynamism, energy and vivacity.

Shora, who will be talking on the stage in Scanpack’s new anniversary area ‘Packaging Plaza’, is a newcomer to the packaging industry. She is the Stockholm girl with a background in street art and mural painting who, over the years, has developed a style that is bold and aesthetically abstract in equal measure, uniquely packaged and with her own signature look. Using mural paintings and graffiti – now regarded as a highly established form of art – Shora communicates about the city and its downsides and leaves the interpretation to the observer.

From large to small scale

Over the years, Shora’s art has become part of Stockholm’s street landscape. That said, the mural painting in Gävle, which she created high up in a sky lift when six months pregnant, is perhaps the one of which she is most proud. It was a powerful feeling, rather than the mural standing out from any of the others she had created in artistic terms.
On a par with these memorable works, there are equally current ones such as her first assignment in the packaging industry – champagne packaging for Alexandre Bonnet, realised as an unconventional meeting between ‘rowdy’ graffiti and dressy champagne.

‘It was a big step, moving from working on mural painting to small scale in digital form,’ Shora explains, adding that as a mural painter she rarely needs to consider anything other than the base. There was a journey from thinking on a large scale to sitting with a product on your knee.

Humbleness about material properties

There were numerous challenges involved in setting out into unknown territory in a fun way.
‘I come from a different direction and don’t have knowledge of materials in the sense of having been trained. For example, what happens with a glossy material when you paint it? And I needed to take into account, for example, what things change in terms of colour saturation in printing.

The fact that the packaging industry is a little bit of science as far as the unique properties of the materials are concerned makes her humble. Put simply, painting murals is more predictable from a knowledge perspective; packaging is something completely different and is more complicated.

‘Of course, the vision of champagne packaging is built around squeezing, feeling and observing. Such as how the bubbles in champagne behave and the colour of the drink,’ says Shora.

She describes her own free interpretation and the results of this as bubbles in somewhat nervous lines, along with shapes rising up towards the surface. And, if she may be allowed to say it herself, she feels that the expression of her designed packaging for Bonnet is an excellent match for the established and crisp, clean content.

‘It goes together and feels very genuine, just like the content.’

Clicked on first meeting

Shora was the child who at the after-school centre would be happiest with her bead plate, and it goes without saying that she has been painting and creating throughout her entire life, perhaps more so than many other children. How she went from these naïve beginnings to reaching for the spray can is a story in its own right:

– ‘I started with graffiti after attending a seminar about the zero tolerance policy that Stockholm City had at the time, which in essence is about censoring an entire form of cultural expression. I then began to get involved in the graffiti promotion movement, to the extent that I soon became the Chair of the association. I hadn’t done any spraying previously and was thinking that now I needed to be able to do the things that I was representing. It was a colossal feeling that first time. Things just clicked between me and the paint cans.

Sees a packaging trend

The collaboration with Bonnet has definitely given her a taste for more. Now Shora is fully engaged and is designing a recycling container for another client. And there are certainly indications for the future of the packaging industry that make her open and positive.

‘I sense trends from minimalism to more detail, where there will be greater room for expression. Conveying more through packaging, rather than less. Perhaps I’ve become more aware of the area since I myself had the chance to design, but I’m finding more thought has been going into the process recently,’ Shora explains, and she describes how now she can be captivated by a shelf in a shop and stand there reading a short greeting on the back of some packaging.

‘Or fun facts placed in some unused location, which in an inspiring way challenge me, as an observer, to explore. I’d like to see more of this,’ Shora Dehnavi ends by saying.

Shora Dehnavi will be giving a talk at Packaging Plaza at Scanpack on 23 October at 3.00 pm.

Read more and buy tickets on Scanpack’s website >>