Tirdad Hashemi is a Tehran-born, Paris- and Berlin-based artist often working in small formats on paper or canvas. They create tenuous spaces where people agitate, congregate, and break out—sometimes freeing themselves from constraints and conventions, sometimes suffocating under rules of decorum and “vomiting all over our well-meaning societies.” The scenes become territory for those living in the margins and theater for their struggles against intolerance, where characters share lasting insomnias, weighty anxieties, and common fights, claiming their right to exist.

As Hashemi describes, they may not be “an activist that dwells in the streets, but an activist with the lifestyle chosen,” creating art as their only necessity and true home. A selected artist in residence at the Pinault Collection in Lens, their identity is built from encounters and prohibitions, with instability creating the language and energy of a generation made up of contradictions where dreams and nightmares turn violence into tenderness.

Image by Masi Abolhassan