Samira Abbassy: Dialogical Narratives
"...Abbassy constructs a personal cosmology where multiple voices—historical, psychological, ancestral—converse within and through the body."
“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.
