RESONANT TURNS | HADIE SHAFIE
Alserkal Avenue, Dubai | 10 - 21 April 2025
Words are Spinning
Essay by Nadine Khalil
“The only possible way out from the impossibility of flight appears to be the formation of a form of flight. In other words, the formation of an identity that flees itself.”
– Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident
Sometimes, what you might think is a turning point is actually the process of finding yourself on the other side of the same path, circular as it may be. It’s a bit like time travel. Hadieh Shafie’s creative practice has flung her far into the future only to relocate her at the beginning.
She recalls a formative memory from her childhood in Iran. She was drawing landscapes on the kitchen floor with her uncle, an engineer, who taught her how to color blades of grass. The grass re-emerges in her latest work Blades (2025) as part of a wall-sized constellation, You and You (2025) where she uses coloring pencils, as she did then, in a field of lines and degradations of green.
The masked language that is fundamental to her practice — often employing single words like عشق (Eshgh), denoting love and longing in Farsi (and Arabic), as well as streams of consciousness and poetry fragments — is hand-painted and spun from the backside of each circle in the work. The circles are portals to the image-in-formation, twisted and tweaked from the back.
By moving each cut a quarter-inch, a displacement occurs. One can imagine that a blind sense of measurement is integral to this process as the artist spins the circles. There’s a child’s sense of play in a technicolor palette. Words brush against each other and change their order; lines break; the visual narrative is disrupted by waves like glitched paintings. It’s as if you were to turn up the dial on a sound to change its intensity or echo. Shafie is asking: can we go back in time and change the future? If writings didn’t have to be hidden, if thoughts were a form of devotion, practiced openly, what would the future look like from where we are standing?
Abstracting words as form, Shafie pays homage to female iconoclasts from Iran, both of whom tragically passed away in their 30s. She incorporates their writing, including the poem ‘Another Birth’ by the feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who stood by her freedom to love whom she pleased, as well as ‘Point by Point’ by Táhirih, a poet and radical theologian, which became a popular song.
“I looked line by line.
What did I find?
You and you, you and you, you and you.”
– Tahirih, Point by Point
The fact that these languages are surfacing in this way in You and You (2025) is poignant when one considers the act of reading as a secret in post-revolutionary Iran, when even particular children’s books were on a watchlist. It was only when Shafie ended up in the US at 13 years old, when an unexpected visa enabled her family to leave (initially for a 2-week holiday) never to return, that she began to understand what was taken away from her experience of childhood.
The act of writing and rewriting perhaps unintentionally evokes a child’s language-learning exercise, while it is also a tactile way for the artist to embrace a certain interiority around the beauty of a culture. There’s an urge to hold and protect these words that women would die for, like warriors. At times singular significations — ‘water’, ‘sun’, ‘love’, ‘death’ — are stretched to frame the entire body of a work, trailing at the edges like embroidery as in her Draw/Cut/Rotate series. Alternatively, her handwriting is completely masked by color on the paper scrolls she calls ketab, or books, coiled and contained within frames as with Resonant Turn I (2025), which sets the tonality of language as color, and code.
“The journey of a form along the line of time
inseminating the line of time with the form, a form conscious of an image
coming back from a feast in a mirror And it is in this way, that someone dies and someone lives on.”
– Forugh Farrokhzad, Another Birth
Shafie’s ketab works are an important facet of her practice as they mark the obfuscation of language through acts of enfoldment – of spinning the words around themselves. Although this gesture is hidden in the final work, it is performative and driven by an urge to perform. In 1995, Shafie did her first physical performance “Spin” where she projected her Eshgh text on her painted body. Swaying to and fro with her breath, she embodied the circle, whirling around until she repeatedly lost her ground.
Her repetitive motions have a sacred quality that resonate with Farrokhzad’s aforementioned fragment about the loss of self in the eye of the divine beholder. Through the artist’s body, form and fugitivity entwine and are in flux. A spinning text is like a spinning body, constantly being reconstituted as it curls on itself.
Shafie’s gesture of enfolding words and material can be seen in the framework of Deleuze’s concept of the fold, which incorporates the word ‘volvo’, or ‘to encircle.’ The scholar Laura Marks links this to the Arabic word bâtin, which signifies deeper truths or latent knowledge. While the root of this word references the belly, or the soft folds that protect our organs, zâhir is what is made manifest and connected to the back or spine, a hard outer covering.
Shafie uses spines and circles as layered shells of tenderness that hold and protect her secrets. The words and forms are in an endless flow, in a constant of unfolding and enfolding and ultimately, it is she who decides what we see. A silkscreen image of Shafie has her frontal gaze scrambled beyond recognition in one of the concentric circles in You and You (2025). As Farrokhzad put it, “Life is perhaps that enclosed moment when my gaze destroys itself in the pupil of your eyes.”
About Hadieh Shafie
Hadieh Shafie’s practice is a process-driven contemplation that uses ink, paint and paper as material for works that abstract text into form, evoking different optical perspectives. Her reliefs comprise circular or cone-shaped scrolls inscribed with Farsi poetry and her own writing in acts of concealment, fragmentation and distortion. Performing the gesture of masking language through repetitive movement, Shafie’s work defies clean categorizations, situating itself between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional plane and generating diverse fields of vision. Her visual language, a form of mark-making, is multi-layered and arises from a profound understanding of words as an energetic charge, color as emotion, and repetition as a kind of spiritual practice.
Shafie's work has been acquired by several institutional collections including The British Museum; Brooklyn Museum; The Columbus Museum; The Dubai Collection; The Farjam Collection; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Princeton University Art Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sheldon Museum of Art; and The Victoria and Albert Museum.
Shafie holds an MFA in imaging and digital arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was awarded the Delfina residency (2025), nominated for the Anonymous Was A Woman Prize in 2017, and shortlisted for the Jameel Prize in 2011. She was an awardee of the 2012 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. She is the recipient of grants from the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund (2011), the Mary Sawyers Baker Award from the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund (2009), and the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant (2008).
