A way of intimate, brutal absurdity suffuses Tirdad Hashemi’s current work, a lot of it made following the killing of Mahsa Amini final September within the artist’s native Iran and the next eruption of ongoing protest in opposition to the nation’s theocratic authorities. Titled after a nursery rhyme from Hashemi’s childhood that’s sung when mourning a beloved one, her exhibition “The Trapped Lullabies” is flooded with the hypnotic sounds of Nacer Ahmadi’s synths and a voice-over of Hashemi studying a poetic incantation by Ali Farid. A rusted detention-center mattress and a pile of burned garments full a dramatic staging tinged with a perverse domesticity.
Not lengthy after discovering asylum in France, Hashemi and her accomplice, Soufia Erfanian, started a collection of works on paper titled “The Blue Poisoning,” 2022, whose icy Drano hue spills throughout illustrations in pastel and pencil. Rueful particulars crystalize. In Pretending that all the pieces is okayfor instance, a sketch of a cocktail glass crammed with olives is thrust into the foreground between a crippled canine and its feminine proprietor, disfigured with a sobering smudge of crimson. One other collection of small works from 2022, this one bearing the exhibition’s title, is leaned in opposition to the wall, forcing viewers to hunch down on the anguished topics: nude figures contoured with finger-applied sand; evoked is a cemetery, the horror of being buried alive. For Cells 162023, Hashemi spreads an expanse of charred earth over a hyperrealistic portray of a jail cell by Ramin Parvin, a part of a group of exiled Iranian artists in Berlin. The canvas gapes with a vertiginous sense of house. We be a part of the artists on the sting of a precipice.
