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

REWIND COLLECTIVE

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.

Rahanjam has held several solo exhibitions in Tehran, including "At the Border of Blue and Gray Sky" at Saless Gallery (2018), "Mania" at Etemad Gallery (2015), "Blue Sky" (2013), and "Women + I" (2012), both at Seyhoun Gallery. She has also been regularly featured in group exhibitions, both in Iran and internationally-in venues such as Paris, the U.S., and China. Her work is recognized not just for its emotional and political depth, but also for its technical rigor and material innovation. With powerful formal language and thoughtful thematic content, Rahanjam's sculptures invite viewers to reflect on social norms, personal identity, and the ways in which individuals navigate-and push against-the constraints of tradition.

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.

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.

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.

Her work has been the subject of numerous solo shows at Seyhoun Gallery in Tehran include Illusion(2013), War, Peace, Love / Razzm, Solh, Eshq (2016), and Peace Lady (2018). Group exhibitions have taken her work beyond Iran, for example in London with the With My Roots show at Asia House. Bagherian’s artistic voice is rooted in a poetic duality: she renders the feminine as simultaneously celestial and earthbound, at once spiritual and corporeal. Her paintings invite reflection on identity, resilience, and the universal yearning for inner peace, framed through the rich tapestry of Persian aesthetic traditions.

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 (2015), Farhangsarai Ferdous Gallery (2016), and Milad Tower Gallery (2016). Her recent pieces, shared widely through digital platforms, 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.

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 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.

EXHIBITIONS