A way of intimate, brutal absurdity suffuses Tirdad Hashemi’s latest 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 cherished 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 mise-en-scène tinged with a perverse domesticity.
Not lengthy after discovering asylum in France, Hashemi and her associate, 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 every little thing is okay, for 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 purple. 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 Cellule 16, 2023, 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 area. We be part of the artists on the sting of a precipice.