BERLIN.- Galerie Barbara Thumm is presenting ‘Widerruf’ (Revocation), the first solo exhibition by German-Iranian artist and poet Farkhondeh Shahroudi, at the gallery.
As the title suggests, the exhibition reflects the current era of uncertainty, where everything can be revoked at any moment, including ceasefires, social infrastructure, human rights or international law. However, the revocation of old ideas or ideologies also opens up space for new ways of thinking.
Born in Tehran in 1962, Shahroudi studied painting there and took part in the revolution against the Shah as a young woman. She fled into exile in Germany with her son in 1990. In Dortmund, she studied design and art. Over the course of more than 30 years, she has developed a complex body of work that increasingly departs from painting to operate at the intersection of visual art, poetry, theatre, and activism. Her works include drawings, woven, stuffed and embroidered sculptures, banners, flags, blankets, installations, performances, processions and photography.
Although Shahroudi’s works and performances are closely linked to protest, activism and ritual, ‚Widerruf‘ focuses on the lyrical, deconstructed grammar that has permeated her work for years, becoming increasingly refined while simultaneously growing rougher, more material and more vulnerable. Everything in Shahroudi’s artistic universe is based on language, poetry and words. She writes in German and Farsi, using her left hand for German even though she is right-handed. She rewrites the Farsi texts repeatedly, turning the writing into a shimmering, illegible ornament. The language is always incomprehensible, flawed and damaged. For her, language is always present in her art, but ‚absent in its message‘. Rather than viewing language as a vehicle of meaning, she considers it to be visual, acoustic or sculptural material that can be expanded into space and detached from traditional symbolism and meaning.
This is evident in Sprachkette (2025), a black branch structure consisting of bandaged letters from the Farsi alphabet. The bodies in Shahroudi’s images, as well as the bodies in the space, form branches, growths and extremities that blossom and sprout – much like the huge, hanging fabric sculptures ‘Leaves leaves’ (2026). Shahroudi’s cosmos is full of mutated, mutilated, germinating and decomposing language and linguistic bodies. Examples include the black, embroidered torsos of Gebild (2026), which hang like strange fruits in a freestanding steel structure. The creative process is also crucial for the artist, as evidenced by her minimalist wall and spatial works. For these, she weaves bicycle innertubes or scraps of fabric into monochrome, grid-like fabrics, or knits delicate curtains and robes from synthetic hair.
These minimalist woven works engage with meditative thought, the inner stream of consciousness, and methods of poetry and storytelling, as well as with democracy by using simple means and materials that are accessible to all.
Shahroudi’s practice is shaped by her engagement with decolonisation, migration and inequality. At the same time, her work is reminiscent of Western modernism, drawing inspiration from Surrealism, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, Fluxus, Zen, post-minimalism and Arte Povera. Shahroudi’s poetry is influenced by the Sufi mystic Rumi, Shi’ite theatre, Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Her art is rooted in an understanding of Western and Eastern art history, as well as in the precarious, the everyday and the vulnerable nature of existence.
Text: Oliver Koerner von Gustorf
