Earlier Works

Where I Was, Where I Dream

2023–2025 · mixed media on canvas, Painting.

Each work holds a single day remembered from a landscape: the day the house was destroyed, the day the plane fell into the lake, a night by the fire reading a poem.

I don’t want to talk about it

2017 · Acrylic and oil on canvas · 8 works, from 60 × 80 to 105 × 162 cm.

I don’t want to talk about it is the sentence we say when something is too close to be spoken; these paintings speak anyway. The series answers war and the language that surrounds it — the slogans, apologies and games that make killing sound reasonable. Each title borrows that language: Commit my sympathy when I send bombs to you; I shoot to kill, I’m a bomber; This is not a game, leave violence and let the love begin. Set beside the paintings, words of sympathy, play and love turn into the vocabulary of attack. The series asks how violence becomes speakable, and what is lost each time it is spoken.

Being Woman

2017–18 · Acrylic on canvas, 40 × 50 cm · 7 untitled works.

The series grew from a question: what is it to be a woman, across different states? In each painting the spaces, the visual elements and the figures were taken from separate images, all of them photographs. Through forms and patches of colour, I have tried in each work to show a psychological state of the women within it.

Unexpected Communications

2016–17 · Acrylic on canvas, 70 × 100 cm ·

Centred on the role of time and space in shaping identity, this series layered symbolic figures, abstract motifs, and expressive colour. Through visual dissonance and complexity, the works posed questions about presence, memory, and contradiction.

Doors of Heaven and Hell

2017–18 · 15 Silkscreen on canvas, 30 × 40 cm ·

Inspired by a Quranic narrative of the realms after death, this series uses silkscreen and fixed landscape forms to explore moral dualities. Each door holds a shifting ethical mood, prompting the viewer to confront their own idea of paradise and punishment.

Birthday

2014–15 · Acrylic on cardboard · 9 portraits: seven at 19 × 29 cm, two at 61.5 × 41.5 cm.

The series began with a question about birth. Each portrait dwells on a single moment in one person’s human state — a moment in which, through the posture of the body, the gaze and the background, I tried to reveal how that person imagines their own birth and their life. The colours and the flatness of the figures and their grounds recall Persian miniature painting for me.

Email: fatanehrahaghi@gmail.com