Shirin Fathi

A beauty culture with rigid standards is a source of great pain and hopelessness for many people.

Working across a variety of media including photography, installation, stich work textile, video, animation and performance, this exhibition brings together artists who focus on the conception of beauty while exploring issues of anxiety, sexual identity, obsession and transformation in relation to gender, ethnicity, nationality and race. The show features works by Tahmineh Monzavi, Niyaz Azadikhah, Zuhra and Moshtari Hilal. 

 Zuhra Hilal looks at the objectification of the female body through textile. In An Exploration of the Nameless Anatomy (2015), Hilal demands a deeper analysis of the female body through performance.

In her series entitled Tina (2010-2012), Monzavi documents a life of a transgender woman in Tehran.

 In Structure (2020), Moshtari Hilal investigates ways in which she could decolonize the Western beauty standards that are imposed on her as an Afghan woman living in Europe.

 In Salasat (2020), Niyaz Azadikhah takes inspiration from personal stories of everyday encounters with people. By using stitch work textiles and animation, Azadikhah taps into the untranslatable nature of human emotion and sees her stitch work textiles as bodies that incorporate the emotions and the memories of their narrator.

This project is part of CISA 2021: This will keep you warm with Khoj and Goethe-Institute