Ascend

(NEW YORK) February 2017—FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—Leila Heller Gallery is proud to present Ascend, an exhibition of new works by Iranian-American artist Shiva Ahmadi, whose ethereal, evocative use of the aesthetic modality of traditional Persian painting ensnares the viewer in complicit landscapes of violence, producing a potent and poetic critique of contemporary politics both foreign and domestic.  Attractive and repulsive, terrible and yet enrobed in playful delight: each of Ahmadi’s complex and indeterminate paintings and objects, replete with violence both real and imagined, daringly address subjects of terrorism, refugees, global capitalism, and corruption—all through symbolic depictions of sublime perpetrators and the most ordinary, innocent, helpless, victim(s). 

September 2, 2015: the body of a small boy, later identified as Aylan Kurdi, washed ashore on the pristine banks of the Mediterranean Sea, drowned.  The three-year-old and his family were refugees, fleeing the escalating humanitarian crisis in Syria. It is a death that spoke to the artist, not sentimentally but symbolically: the sign of a closure of the promise of the European-cum-American experiment of universal rights or justice.  Ahmadi funneled her outrage into the production of this new body of work: playing upon an alliteration of the boy’s name in ancient Arabic, meaning ‘high one’, or ‘to ascend'.

Blood, bombs, and the ties that bind in violence, appear once and again in the artist’s oeuvre, manifesting a visual language of seductive indeterminacy, whose ambivalence points both towards the horror of violence and oppression while also presenting the suggestion, however macabre, of a reversal of power—or at very least signification—for better or worse.  “Ahmadi’s painterly language,” comments scholar Talinn Grigor in an essay on the artist’s work, “transforms monkeys into despots, thrones into bigoted states, bubbles into bombs, paint into blood, and hospitality into global violence.” 

Reversal, contrast, and the inhuman, widening gulf of inequality are all essential to the complexity of juxtapositions, which mark Ahmadi’s delicate and indomitable body of work.  In The Knot, a vast 40” by 60” watercolor and ink on paper, figures float on an aqueous green background.  On the left-hand side, a figure sits upon a golden throne—itself a visual trope in Ahmadi’s work—invoking both a tradition of Iranian hospitality and a symbol of autocratic rule. On the far right of the image, attendants hold ambiguous, round objects in tribute (which could be either bombs or balloons), their faceless visages pointed up towards a third grouping: a winged character in an uncertain narrative, holding up the ascending figure of a little boy.  Ahmadi further explores this narrative through the medium of video, in Ascend, a short animation with sound.