Hoda Kashiha at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain
Hoda Kashiha’s first institutional exhibition in Europe takes its identify from her latest collection “I’m Right here, I’m Not Right here,” 2020–21. Developed throughout 4 canvases, the work repeats a motif pulled from an American postcard: a cartoonish rendition of a blonde woman in a pink high holding a daisy. The artist depicts the complete determine simply as soon as. With every repetition, she obscures the appropriated kind with swatches of purple and black vinyl, finally draining it of all shade in a cut-out model in white on white.
On the coronary heart of this present is “In appreciation of Blinking,” 2021: eight large-scale work organized in a line, every canvas fastened to its personal steel stand on wheels. Kashiha’s Final Sundown, Final Dive is positioned on the entrance, a juxtaposition of a hyperreal orchid blossom in full tropical shade with an anime diver in black and white. This feminine silhouette is blurred with spray paint in an enhanced rendering of urgency and velocity. The consecutive compositions are lined in a wash of black acrylic that descends decrease on every canvas, like a falling curtain. By the final portray, titled There Is a Brick Wall, Bricks Are Damaged, And She Falls, So Comfortable Birthday to All, the supply composition is submerged solely in black.
The work echoes not solely Malevich’s Black Sq., but in addition the social media response to Iran’s political uprisings in late 2017 and the newer Blackout Tuesday, organized following the police killings of Black Individuals Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Inside Kashiha’s apply, the black sq. originated in an animated movie she started through the first Covid lockdown, The Eyes Fill with Brightness Slip Over to the Black Shades, 2021. Proven right here, the work is the younger artist’s first video, a medium she’s lengthy used to check compositions earlier than inserting them on canvas. On the tail of her one-month residency at this establishment, Kashiha has allowed herself to disclose extra of what occurs inside her immense studio on the outskirts of Tehran, a spot the place she is making the mechanisms of invisibility seen.
— Lillian Davies
