Galerie Nathalia Obadia is pleased to present five new paintings by the Iranian artist Hoda Kashiha. The canvases in this new body of work echo one another, like chapters of an initiation narrative. For the first time, the artist is drawing from the imagery of eighteenth-century Indian miniatures - not as simple ornamentation, but as a symbolic language, capable of harnessing resistance and transformation. This new direction is inflected through a contemporary digital aesthetic with surrealist flourishes, neither diminishing the political significance of the works.
Born in Tehran in 1986, Hoda Kashiha grew up in the last years of the Iran-Iraq war, a period which art critic Lillian Davies characterizes as flashes of a "dangerously fragmented narrative "¹. This experience of rupture has had a lasting impact on her work: her paintings are constructed from dispersed and dissected forms of narration, motifs appearing and disappearing like layered memories. Inspired by the Iranian artist Behjat Sadr - who affirms that one must use everything that might express the emotions of our times, tearing and collaging pages from magazines, endlessly inventing new tools² - Hoda Kashiha has developed a practice where memory and invention are tightly intertwined. Her studies at the Tehran University of Art, under the strict regime of censorship, then her exchange at Boston University in 2014, where Dana Frankfort encouraged her to shift from drawing to painting, refined her relation to images and narrative. In 2016, she returned to Iran, where she currently lives and works, regularly travelling between Tehran, Paris and New York.
This international mobility has subsequently allowed Kashiha to deepen her knowledge of art history, discovering Indian miniatures and the art of Kangra, notably in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Derived from the Pahari tradition, the Kangra art style elaborated a highly finessed pictorial language, known for its refined mark-making and powdery colour palette. It explores the expression of the shringara, the "original rasa"3 of Indian aesthetics, associating the experience of love with a rage of affective states. This sensibility, both intimate and universal, resonates with Kashiha's own visual language: rather than just a formal reference, the miniatures become her poetic foundation.
Making this heritage her own, the artist puts forth a new reading: in Kashiha's oeuvre, colours intensify while objects overcome their function, shifting into characters. The vase occupies an important place in these new works: both ritual object and fantastical vessel, it transforms into a feminine figure, between body and object. The voluptuous form of these figures also originates in a primordial gesture: clay modelling. When practised in a meditative state, the making of pottery allows for a direct relationship with materiality, movement and thought coming together in the same choreography.
An animistic dimension reveals itself in her paintings: each object becomes a narrative element, steeped with affect. Referring to both art history and popular culture, these objects are incarnated through the artist's constantly transforming personal aesthetic. Kashiha takes distance from the traditional motifs of Indian miniatures, exploring the metamorphosis and emancipation of these figures. The house, a symbol of refuge and retreat, gives way to unstable metaphors, like flowers in a storm. In one of the works from this series, a woman's torso bends towards her mirror image, exposed to violent winds. Petals and draped fabric resist the gust, suspended in a precarious equilibrium. The flower becomes a metamorphic symbol, combining beauty and violence, fragility and tenacity. Here, natural forces do not overwhelm the characters: they reveal their capacity to dwell in the torment.
This exhibition thus marks a turning point in the work of Hoda Kashiha, the artist affirming the possibility of a renewed equilibrium: a world where we move forward through desire and transformation, both towards and against the sky.
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¹Lillian Davies, "Shadows They Cast," in Hoda Kashiha: Slipping on Fragmented Shapes, Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2025.
²Behjat Sadr, remarks from 1995 quoted by Lillian Davies, "Shadows They Cast," in Hoda Kashiha: Slipping on Fragmented Shapes, Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2025, who refers to the press release for the exhibition Behjat Sadr, Balice Hertling, Paris, 5 April - 1 June 2019.
³In classical Indian aesthetics, a rasa ("flavour" or "essence") designates a universal emotional experience felt by the spectator. According to the Nātyaśāstra, there are nine of them, including Śrngāra (love and desire), which is considered to be the origin of the other aesthetic emotions. This approach is echoed in Western painting (from the Baroque period to Romanticism), where colour, light and composition translate and provoke affect.
