Tirdad Hashemi was born in 1991 in Teheran, Iran. They live and work between Paris and Berlin.
Whether on paper or canvas, often in small formats and depending on the means at hand, people agitate, congregate and break out. Sometimes they seem to free themselves from all constraints and conventions, and sometimes they suffocate on our rules of decorum, finally vomiting all over our well-meaning societies.
In the tenuous spaces Hashemi creates, as in the interior of a bedroom, unspeakable desires are
born, and overflow, and mingle. A community of individuals without borders and coming from
multiple cultures arises. The scenes depicted become the territory of those that live in the margins, as well as the theatre of their struggles against intolerance. And there, they share lasting insomnias, weighty anxieties and common fights, claiming their right to exist, at least on paper. The formal perspectives, vacillating and complex, echo the intensity of the moments lived but above all the fragility of these same, almost unreal, instants.
Whether in Paris, Berlin, Istanbul or Teheran, these characters are determined to free themselves from imposed societal, family or religious truths. Their identity is built from encounters and prohibitions. Instability creates their language, their energy, that of a generation made up of contradictions where dreams and sometimes nightmares tell other stories and turn violence into tenderness.
In their own words, the artist may not be “an activist that dwells in the streets, but an activist with the lifestyle chosen”. Hashemi will never feel free from their home country, Iran, but somehow, they will remain a foreigner, a stranger wherever they goes. Art is their only necessity, their true home. The only place where they can express fully. The only place where they can be at the same time themselves and others, because in this space, everything is still possible.