Tirdad Hashemi
Iran
Tirdad Hashemi (b. 1991, Tehran) has drawn for as long as they can remember. Growing up in an environment where personal and emotional struggles were rarely voiced, drawing became a means to articulate what could not be spoken. This early reliance on image-making continues to shape their practice, which has evolved from coded gestures into more direct forms of address.
Working primarily in figuration, Hashemi adopts a crude, immediate visual language that resists refinement in favour of honesty, recalling a childlike mode of expression — intuitive, uninhibited, and unpoliced.
Grounded in lived experience, Hashemi’s work foregrounds queer embodiment, intimacy, and care, where the everyday becomes inherently political.
Personal narratives unfold through both image and text, with titles — often drawn from a long-standing letter-writing practice — acting as extensions of the drawings and inviting viewers into intimate spaces of correspondence.
Collaboration is central to their approach, particularly in the ongoing Flower series with Soufia Erfanian, where layered compositions of flowers and figures from the artist’s circle position community as both subject and method, reflecting on care and mutual support within conditions of precarity.
Gallery Isabelle
Founded in 2006 in Dubai, Gallery Isabelle is a contemporary art gallery committed to long-term artist development.
Works
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