Shiva Ahmadi: Crown of Flames
Current exhibition
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Haines Gallery proudly presents Crown of Flames, our second solo exhibition with Iranian-American multimedia artist Shiva Ahmadi (b. 1975, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area). Conceived before the current Middle Eastern conflict, Crown of Flames features new and recent works that continue Ahmadi’s longterm exploration of conflict, corruption, and instability, informed by her own experiences and the current news cycle. The works on view unfold as both personal testimony and global allegory, at once dazzling and devastating. Across painting, sculpture, and video, Ahmadi fuses formal beauty with an undercurrent of violence, drawing uneasy parallels between her brightly painted scenes and global issues of war, resource extraction, and the rise of authoritarian regimes — in the United States, Iran, Venezuela, and beyond.
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Crown of Flames debuts Ahmadi’s new video work of the same title, a two-channel animation comprising hundreds of individual, hand-painted watercolors that she transforms into vivid, moving images that pulse with life. The story unfolds across two parallel worlds: a lush jungle inhabited by playful monkeys on one screen, and a desert oil field and its looming, pumping machinery on the other. Drawing from diverse storytelling traditions ranging from Persian miniature painting to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Ahmadi crafts a contemporary parable about land grabs and resource wars, and the consequences for individuals and the environment.
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Ahmadi's new animation is shown alongside a suite of related limited edition prints, as well as intricate embellished sculptures from her Oil Barrel and Pressure Cooker series, and luminous watercolor paintings are centered upon female figures. Taken together, the works on view in Crown of Flames offer a fable of our times. As Ahmadi reminds us, “For me it really doesn’t matter where you live — whether it is Iran, Syria, or Detroit. My work deals with abuse of power and corruption.” In a period shaped by increasing polarization and instability, the exhibition urgently suggests the necessity of seeing clearly—and refusing to look away.
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