LÜBECK.- They gather, hold one another, resist, bear witness. Bodies occupy the center of Tirdad Hashemi’s paintings. Set within scenes that move between abstract floral landscapes and burning cities, Hashemi’s figures form bodily constellations through which emotional and political narratives unfold. The artist invites viewers into an intimate, interior world in which everyday gestures and encounters carry the potential for self-determination.

Executed in acrylic on canvas, Hashemi’s paintings are characterized by visible brushstrokes and fluid transitions of color that lend the works a sense of immediacy. Loosely drawn figures suggest openness and vulnerability, while gestural marks introduce instability and, at times, violence. Rather than constructing singular or linear narratives, the paintings condense fragments of memory alongside the present. Figures appear at once solid and dissolving, suspended between visibility and disappearance. Even as rupture becomes apparent, the pictorial space remains mutable: another body appears, flowers begin to grow, scenes shift.

In The Slow Rhythm of Care, Hashemi’s focus turns more explicitly toward an immediate present charged with documentary resonance. Scenes of protest—women in the streets, bodies held upright, gazes that refuse to turn away—come to the fore. Images of violence permeate the compositions: suggested gallows, traces of blood, fragmented bodies. These motifs point toward a contemporary reality in which state repression and public punishment are used to suppress dissent.

Rather than simply reproducing such images, Hashemi translates them into a visual language that is visceral and embodied. The pictorial ground remains unstable and the scenes fragmentary, resisting any fixed interpretation. Images that have shaped collective visual memory—bodies gathered in public space, gestures of self-empowerment, and acts of resistance circulated through digital networks—enter the paintings alongside moments of lived and remembered experience. Hashemi’s work does not so much document these images as absorb and transform their emotional and political charge.

Seen against the backdrop of the resurgence of feminist protest in Iran, and particularly the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the paintings acquire an added urgency. The movement’s reclamation of public space finds echoes in Hashemi’s recurring attention to bodies that stand, gather, move, and endure. Within scenes marked by fear and vulnerability, collective presence becomes an assertion in itself.

The bodies in these paintings are therefore not merely witnesses to repression but bearers of solidarity. They touch, protect, confront, and remain. Between blood and gesture, threat and persistence, intimacy and collective action, Hashemi creates a pictorial space in which individual lives cannot be separated from the political forces that shape them. At the same time, these forces never entirely determine the bodies depicted: their proximity to one another opens onto other possibilities of relation, care, and self-determination.

Through this simultaneous expression of vulnerability and connection, Hashemi reveals how deeply intimacy and political struggle are intertwined. The paintings hold these experiences in view without resolving them, allowing tenderness and violence, private memory and collective resistance, rupture and persistence to coexist. In doing so, they insist on the aesthetic and social possibilities that continue to emerge within contemporary life.

Curated by Paula Kommoss