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Dialogical Narratives brings together a powerful selection of paintings and works on paper by Samira Abbassy, whose visual language is rooted in the multiplicity of identities, mythologies, and emotional states that emerge from cultural displacement. Working across figuration, allegory, and symbolic fragmentation, Abbassy constructs a personal cosmology where multiple voices—historical, psychological, ancestral—converse within and through the body.
In this exhibition, the canvas becomes a space of dialogue: between self and other, memory and myth, East and West. Drawing from Islamic miniatures, Sufi cosmologies, and her own diasporic experiences as an Iranian-born artist raised in the UK and living in New York, Abbassy’s figures resist singular interpretation. They are at once deconstructed and reconstituted—unfixed yet intimate, wounded yet luminous.
The title Dialogical Narratives references the polyphonic nature of Abbassy’s work, in which competing truths and identities are allowed to coexist. Rather than presenting a linear or resolved narrative, her compositions dwell in the in-between: voices overlapping, selves splitting and merging, time collapsing into layered, archetypal tableaux.
This exhibition invites viewers into a space of relational witnessing—where storytelling becomes a form of healing, and the self emerges not as a singular entity, but as an ongoing conversation.
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"In the current art landscape, Abbassy’s practice feels both singular and urgently relevant. Alongside other diasporic women artists who braid cultural memory with contemporary symbolism, she is part of a movement that refuses to flatten identity into a single narrative. Instead, she insists on complexity, layering past and present, myth and autobiography."
- Noah Becker, Whitehot Magazine
Read the rest of Whitehot's review here.
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"The study of Qajar Court paintings (19th C) has been central to my work for three decades, and my interest lies specifically in how the Qajar artists translated their visual language in such a short space of time and adjust to the paradigm shift from the manuscript to large scale oil paintings. Their intriguing appearance is due to a ‘misinterpretation’, and a slippage of language. Just as the Iranian artists were translating into the language of European painting, I find parallels in my own biography and my efforts to translate myself back into my indigenous culture, adapting western painting techniques to the language of Persian painting."
– SAMIRA ABBASSY
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ARTWORKS
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Abbassy's paintings suggest that we are not solitary beings made of fixed truths about ourselves, but rather participants in an ongoing exchange, shaped by what we encounter and what encounters us. She invites us to consider identity not as something we possess, but as something we participate in—a living process of exchange and transformation that connects us to the broader web of existence, where every encounter has the potential to remake us anew.
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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
SAMIRA ABBASSY
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Samira Abbassy | Dialogical Narratives
Current viewing_room
