MENASA+: Thresholds of Representation: Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. Fl. 1E

Alemeh Bagherian

Alemeh Bagherian's works are rooted in a background informed by traditional Persian carpet design. Bagherian’s practice incorporates myth, imagery, and cultural memory, utilizing layers of Persian motifs, drawn largely from the Shahnameh (Epic of Kings), onto paintings of sensual female figures, celebrating the enduring beauty and complexity of womanhood within Persian culture. Written between 977 and 1010 by the poet Ferdowsi (940–1020), the Shahnameh is regarded as a repository of Persian language and identity. Composed entirely of words of Persian origin and filled with chronicles of ancient Persian kings, the text emerged after the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Persia, during a period when Arab rulers attempted to suppress the Persian language in favor of Arabic. Bagherian’s work draws from these narratives. By weaving Shahnameh imagery into her paintings, she affirms and reclaims her cultural heritage. Her meticulous attention to detail brings a captivating intricacy to each piece, while her figures convey a layered mix of sensuality, introspection, pleasure, and pain.

Bagherian has presented numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including shows at the Women United Art Movement in Vémyslice, Czech Republic (2024); Seyhoun Art Gallery (2021, 2018, 2016); Liliya Art Gallery (2021); 1912 Gallery (2020); the International Izmir Art Biennial (2015); as well as exhibitions at Rooz Art Gallery, East Art Gallery, and Shahed Art Gallery in Tehran. Her work has also been widely included in group exhibitions such as East to West and Echoes of Persia at Parseen Art Gallery (2025, 2024); Rooted Trees organized by UNESCO (traveling); Artful Expression and Creative Iranian Women at the South Asia Institute; Women Life Freedom at A+C Gallery (2022); the World Art Exhibition at the Dubai World Trade Centre; Veiled Bodies at Liliya Art Gallery (London); exhibitions with Capital Art at Asia House in London; international exhibitions with LinArt in Istanbul; and the 4th Fajr International Festival of Visual Arts (2011). Alemeh Bagherian, was born in Ghaemshahr (Qaem Shahr), a coastal town in northern Iran along the Caspian Sea, she lives and works in Tehran. Bagherian is a member of the Society of Iranian Painters. 

SHAHPARI RAHMANI

Shahpari Rahmani is an Iranian painter whose work maps the psychic terrain of contemporary life through a highly textural, expressive visual language. Rooted in her formal training at Alzahra University—where she earned degrees in Graphic Design, Painting, and a Master’s in Painting—Rahmani's practice threads together material rigor with an acute sensitivity to cultural memory. Working primarily in acrylic and mixed media on canvas, Rahmani builds chromatic, atmospheric fields that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Her surfaces carry the imprint of layered gestures, unruly marks, and spectral silhouettes, evoking states of uprising, rupture, and renewal. Across her paintings, the figure often appears dissolved or reconstituted—an emblem of both vulnerability and insistence.

Rahmani’s work has been exhibited across Tehran, including presentations at Ginos Gallery, Farhangsarai Ferdous Gallery, and Milad Tower Gallery. Her recent pieces extend her ongoing inquiry into the body as a site of transformation, questioning how personal and collective narratives are shaped, obscured, or reclaimed through gesture. Rahmani positions painting as an arena where memory, myth, and interior life converge. Her canvases stand as charged thresholds, inviting viewers into spaces where emotion becomes material and where visibility itself becomes an act of agency.

GORDON CHEUNG

Gordon Cheung has developed a multidisciplinary practice working across virtual and actual realities, to reflect on the existential questions of what it means to be human in civilisations with histories written by victors. Utilizing sculpture, painting, and digital media; Cheung merges virtual and physical realities through his works, constructing atmospheric worlds that confront the existential conditions of contemporary life. Cheung's practice interrogates a culture shaped by accelerated capitalism, algorithmic governance, and histories authored by dominant powers. His hybrid visual language draws from cultural mythology, religious symbolism, geopolitical spectacle, and the poetics of diaspora, forming hallucinatory, urban-surreal terrains that echo his own in-between identity and the psychological space of global precarity.

Cheung earned his BFA in Painting from Central Saint Martins, London, in 1998, followed by an MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2001. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including presentations at The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse); Cristea Gallery, London (The Light that Burns Twice as Bright); Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, UK (Here Be Dragons); and Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, West Palm Beach, FL (New Order Vanitas). Cheung’s work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Whitworth, Manchester; the Royal College of Art, London; and the British Museum, among others.

MANISH NAI

SARA RAHANJAM

Born and raised in Iran, Sara Rahanjam's practice emerges from the lived realities of women in Iran—realities circumscribed by cultural and traditional systems that have dictated the boundaries of freedom and expression. Through her work, she channels these experiences into a broader dialogue about the collective longing for transformation that defies contemporary Iranian society. In her paintings, sculptures, performances, and writings, Rahanjam reflects the tension between endurance and rebellion. Each gesture—whether a brushstroke, a repositioning of figures, a line of text, or a composed sound—embodies both a protest and an act of reclamation. Rahanjam's work bears witness to limitations imposed upon women, and to reveal the strength, beauty, and intellect that persist in defiance of those constraints. Engaging deeply with the perspectives, needs, and pains shared among her community, Rahanjam creates works that resonate with emotional intensity. Her practice operates as both mirror and megaphone.Through this interplay of personal narrative and collective consciousness, she transforms private struggle into public discourse. At once poetic and political, Rahanjam’s work balances the refinement of aesthetic inquiry with the force of advocacy. She aspires to inspire contemplation, evoke empathy, and catalyze change—transforming art into a vehicle for awakening. Through her practice, Rahanjam continues to advance a vision of cultural and social evolution rooted in the unwavering pursuit of equality.

Since 2012, Sara Rahanjam has engaged with the visual language of conflict—crafting sculptural forms that reinterpret the iconography of war through a deeply personal and human lens. In her Objects of War series, rockets, bombs, and gas masks are reimagined not as weapons, but as vessels of reflection—repositories for fear, resilience, and collective memory.

The sculptures juxtapose polished, futuristic forms with intricate, hand-painted motifs drawn from Persian miniature painting. This fusion of tradition and modernity transforms instruments of destruction into objects of beauty and contemplation. The delicate ornamentation—floral vines, mythic figures, and radiant explosions—renders the surfaces alive with tension, embodying the collision between cultural heritage and technological violence.

Living in the Middle East, Rahanjam describes existing “under the shadows of war; a wound that never truly heals.” Her work seeks not to aestheticize violence but to understand it—to trace how fear and trauma can coexist with faith, creativity, and survival.

In the wake of renewed geopolitical unrest, these sculptures resonate with renewed urgency. Their gleaming exteriors mirror both the seductive allure and the devastating consequence of power. Through them, Rahanjam invites viewers to confront the paradox of beauty born from ruin—to see, within the machinery of destruction, the indelible persistence of human spirit.

Rahanjam has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Iran and internationally, with presentations at GRK Gallery in Paris; CAMA Gallery, Sales Gallery, Iranshahr Gallery, Negar Gallery, and Baroug Gallery in Tehran; and exhibitions in China addressing contemporary Iranian art. Her work has been included in major international biennials, including the 5th Beijing Biennial (China, 2012), the 2nd International Mediterranean Biennial (Split, Croatia, 2010), and multiple editions of the Sculpture Biennial for Urban Space in Tehran (2008, 2018).

She has received several awards recognizing her contributions to visual art, including first prize at the National Festival of Urban Space in Mashhad (2010), first prize at the 6th Visual Arts Festival in Shiraz, second prize at the 5th Visual Arts Festival in Shiraz, and third prize at the National Fine Arts Company Festival Imam Reza in Shiraz (2008). Rahanjam has also participated in international symposia, including the 4th Sand Sculpture Symposium in Tehran (2012) and the 2nd Sand Sculpture Symposium in Babolsar (2006).

HAYA ZAIDI

Karachi-based multidisciplinary artist Haya Zaidi works at the convergence of Indo-Persian miniature painting, mixed media, and contemporary feminist discourse. Grounding her practice in the visual and literary lineages of South Asia, Zaidi examines how the brown female body becomes a contested site of inheritance, mythology, and resistance. Through intricate symbolism and layered narrative, she reconfigures archetypal imagery to articulate a selfhood shaped by both cultural memory and the psychic interiority of womanhood. Zaidi’s work interrogates the iconography of femininity and the systems that script its representation. Drawing from South Asian mythological frameworks and the codified language of Indo-Persian miniature traditions, she constructs new visual propositions for how the feminine may be claimed, embodied, and reimagined. Her compositions speak to questions of sovereignty and interior power, exploring how women create agency within, and in spite of, the structures that circumscribe them. Psychological inquiry forms a central thread in her practice. Engaging with Carl Jung’s theories of archetypes, the shadow, and individuation, Zaidi reflects on the transformational potential of integrating the repressed or disavowed self. This lens resonates with the contemporary female experience in Pakistan, where shifting cultural realities are expanding the terrain for women’s self-authorship and collective visibility. Bridging image and text through the cadence of Urdu and Persian poetry, Zaidi traces themes of longing, desire, suffering, and transcendence. Her work moves fluidly between the earthly and the metaphysical, illuminating how spirituality, philosophy, and lived experience shape the emotional and cultural landscape of South Asian womanhood.

Haya Zaidi has developed a steadily rising exhibition presence across Pakistan and internationally, with a series of formally ambitious and conceptually rigorous solo and group presentations. Her solo exhibitions at Sanat Initiative in Karachi—Becoming (2025), Angst: Portrait of an Afterthought (2023), and Family Hall (2021)—have marked key evolutions in her practice, each expanding her exploration of gendered embodiment, domestic memory, and the politics of representation. She has also staged Unpinned at The Colony in Lahore (2021), further cementing her position within Pakistan’s contemporary art discourse. Zaidi’s work has been featured in significant group shows, including Of Women by Women: South Asian Feminist Art and Artists from the Hundal Collection at the South Asia Art Institute in Chicago (2025), signaling her growing international reach. Earlier exhibitions such as Parallel Realities (2018), Flower of a Blue Flame (2018), Microcosm (2017), and Premise of Promise (2017) at leading Karachi and Lahore venues introduced her emerging voice, establishing the conceptual foundations and visual language that continue to define her practice today.

REWIND COLLECTIVE

MICHAEL JOO

Michael Joo is a conceptual artist whose work is rooted in an examination of perception. He is more interested in the way we perceive than what it is we are looking at. Joo’s multi-disciplinary studio practice mobilizes intense scientific research, ontology, epistemology, and entropy, creating a cross-disciplinary and multidimensional dialogue that results in aesthetic phenomena that document the process of their creation. The hybrid aspect of Joo’s aesthetic language reflects his own history. Born to Korean parents in the United States, Joo was raised in a multicultural environment that was influenced by a range of interests including science, academia, and artistry. By juxtaposing humanity’s various pools of knowledge and culture, Joo addresses the fluid nature of identity, mirroring the complexity and richness of his individual identity and of the collective identity of contemporary society. By combining a range of techniques associated with sculpture, painting, photography, and printmaking, the work continually blurs the boundaries between art and science. Joo’s intention as an artist is to achieve the unachievable: to make us see an object in real life that is barely conceivable as thought alone.

Major exhibitions of Joo's work include Sweat Models 1991–2026 at Space ZeroOne, New York, NY; the Hawai‘i Triennial HT22, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, HI; Perspectives: Michael Joo, Smithsonian Freer | Sackler Museum, Washington, DC, USA; 49th Venice Biennale, Korean Pavilion, Italy; Sensory Meridian, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Michael Joo, Conserving Momentum (Egg/Gyro/Laundry Room), White Cube London, UK; Michael Joo: Drift, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, USA; Michael Joo: Drift (Bronx), The Bronx Museum of Arts, New York, NY, USA; Michael Joo, Doppelganger, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, UK; and Michael Joo Retrospective, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, CA, USA.

Joo is a Senior Critic in Sculpture at Yale University and teaches in the Columbia University MFA program. His work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Denver Art Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, among others. In 2026, Joo's work was selected to be prominently featured in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh.

KARIM ABU SHAKRA

Born in Umm al‑Fahm, Karim Abu Shakra emerges from a deeply rooted tradition of creativity. Raised in an artistic family, his path was profoundly shaped by the legacy of his late uncle Asim Abu Shakra — whose cactus-laden canvases spoke quietly yet powerfully of exile, displacement, and identity. 

After graduating from the arts program at Beit Berl College, Karim embarked on a journey to translate memory, belonging, and longing into colour and form. His oeuvre — primarily oil and acrylic on canvas — moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, blending surreal imagery, folkloric echoes, and vivid painterly energy. 

At the heart of his work lies a symbolic lexicon: cacti, olive branches, birds, whales — shapes that resist a singular reading and invite contemplation. The cactus, or sabra, stands out as a signature motif: a plant that endures harsh terrain, rooted yet resilient. In Karim’s hands it becomes not a static symbol but a living emblem of survival, hope, and continuity — a visual metaphor for people who remain, remember, and resist. 

But Karim’s imagery seldom remains literal. In series such as Metamorphosis, plants, animals, and humans converge in hybrid forms — cactus-cockatoos, fish drifting above seated men, whales carried in the sky — unsettling yet soulful. These works challenge the boundaries between the human and the natural, the familiar and the uncanny, suggesting that identity, memory, and existence are fluid terrains. 

Karim Abu Shakra has presented a series of solo exhibitions throughout his career, beginning with In Love with Color and Brush at Tamra Municipal Gallery in 2008, curated by Ahmed Knaan, followed by Black and White at the Palestinian National Theater, Jerusalem (2009). In 2013, he exhibited Self-Portrait at Abdaa Gallery, Kfar Yassif, curated by Ahmed Knaan. In 2015, he presented The Continuity of the Accumulation at Gallery Echat in Ramallah and The Unity of Man, Nature and Life at Umm al-Fa Ham Art Gallery, curated by Ahmed Knaan and Aida Nasrallah, with an artist’s book supported by the Israel Lottery for Culture. Subsequent solo projects include From Inside to Outside at Mahmoud Darwish Gallery, Nazareth (2016), Metamorphosis at Gallery Zawyeh, Ramallah (2017), The Thorns of Life at Mahnaim Gallery – Art Gallery, Mahnaim (2019), What Stands Opposite to the Face at Petah Tikva Museum of Art, curated by Neta Gal-Atzmon (2022), and Where Roots Touch the Light at Zawyeh Gallery, Ramallah (2025).

Abu Shakra’s work has also featured in numerous group exhibitions internationally. Key shows include Black Coffee at the Festival ‘The Holiday of Holidays’, Beit HaGefen, Haifa (2006); Memory in the Future and Future Memory in Paris, France (2008); Portraits with Aroma 2 at Yigal Alon House, Ginosar (2009); Gaza is Not Running Out, Shababik Contemporary Art Group, Gaza (2010); the Jaffa Salon of Palestinian Art, Jaffa Port (2011); The Olive in Palestinian Artat Al Saraya Gallery, Nazareth (2012); Tree Mask at Yigal Alon House, Ginosar (2012); and the ‘Palestinian Art Salon’ featuring Karim Abu Shakra – New Works (2013). Later exhibitions include My Views in the Vision of Time, Elfalesteny Fan-El Hosh, Jerusalem (2014); Roots of Identity, BOND Museum, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); Kesher, Art Kiyan, Amman (2016); The Same Place, Oranim College Gallery (2016); Shish Tzabar, Zuzu Gallery, Emek Hefer (2021); Fokat, Tel Aviv Museum of Art Point (2021); The Spirit of Man, the Spirit of Place, Ein Harod Art Center (2022); and recent shows including Fresh Paint, The Village Salon, Beit Hankin – Multidisciplinary Museum Space, Kfar Yehoshua, Kol Ha'am – War Diary, Janko Dada Museum, Ein Hod, From Palestine with Art, P1 Gallery, London (2024), In Her Image, Ramat Gan Art Museum (2025), Will There Ever Be Days, Heussenstamm-Galerie (2025), and MENASA+: Thresholds of Representation at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd. Chiago, IL.

EXHIBITIONS