RESONANT TURNS | HADIEH SHAFIE
Alserkal Avenue, Dubai | 10 - 21 April 2025
“Art is the most beautiful of all lies. But it is a lie that reflects the truth. A circle is a lie, but it has the beauty of truth in it.” – Maurice Ravel
Sometimes, what you might think is a turning point is actually the process of finding yourself on the other side of the same path. It’s a bit like time travel. Hadieh Shafie’s creative practice has flung her far into the future only to relocate her back at the beginning.
The masked language that is fundamental to her practice often employs single words like (Eshgh), denoting love and longing in Farsi (and Arabic), as well as streams of consciousness and poetry fragments by feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad and radical theologian Táhirih (also known as Qurrat al-ʿAyn or “Consolation of the Eyes”). There is an urge to protect these words, which are hand-painted and spun from the backside of each circle in the large-scale work You and You (2025). The circles are portals to the image-in-formation, twisted and tweaked. They are also time capsules.
Shafie is asking: ‘Can we go back in time and change the future?’ If writings didn’t have to be hidden, if thoughts were a form of devotion, practiced openly, what would the future look like from where we are standing? By moving each cut a quarter-inch, a displacement occurs. One can imagine that a blind sense of measurement is integral to this process as the artist spins the circles. Words brush against each other and change their order; lines break; the visual narrative is disrupted by waves like glitched paintings. It’s as if you were to turn up the dial on a sound to change its echo.
Shafie uses spines and circles as layered shells of tenderness that hold and protect her secrets. The words and forms are in a constant state of unfolding and enfolding, and ultimately, it is she who decides what we see. At times singular significations — ‘water’, ‘sun’, ‘love’, ‘death’ — are stretched to frame the entire body of a work, trailing at the edges like embroidery. Alternatively, her handwriting is completely concealed by color on the paper scrolls she calls ketab (book), or books, coiled and contained within frames as with Resonant Turn I (2025), which sets the tonality of language as code. In You and You (2025), a silkscreen image of Shafie has her frontal gaze scrambled, as if it were subject to a ripple, moving backwards in time. It is an image from a 1995 performance, Spin — her first – in which she projected words of devotion on her painted body while she whirled around, losing her ground. Embodying the circle, this loss of self is again evoked as both form and its rupture(s), except in this instance, she contains the image as a whole, i.e. her portrait gazing back at the viewer. Here lies the trace of a movement, a residue, and there, a sound.
Hadieh Shafie's (b. 1969, Tehran) practice is a process-driven contemplation that uses ink, paint and paper as material for works that abstract text into form, evoking different optical perspectives. Her reliefs comprise circular or cone-shaped scrolls inscribed with Farsi poetry and her own writing in acts of concealment, fragmentation and distortion. Performing the gesture of masking language through repetitive movement, Shafie’s work defies clean categorizations, situating itself between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional plane and generating diverse fields of vision. Her visual language, a form of mark-making, is multi-layered and arises from a profound understanding of words as an energetic charge, color as emotion, and repetition as a kind of spiritual practice. Shafie's work has been acquired by several institutional collections including The British Museum; Brooklyn Museum; The Columbus Museum; The Dubai Collection; The Farjam Collection; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Princeton University Art Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sheldon Museum of Art; and The Victoria and Albert Museum. Shafie holds an MFA in imaging and digital arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was awarded the Delfina residency (2025), nominated for the Anonymous Was A Woman Prize in 2017, and shortlisted for the Jameel Prize in 2011. She was an awardee of the 2012 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. She is the recipient of grants from the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund (2011), the Mary Sawyers Baker Award from the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund (2009), and the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant (2008).
Words by: Nadine Khalil
In collaboration with E Plus A Atelier
