Hadi Falapishi (b.1987) lives and works in New York. In his work, Falapishi employs a seemingly humorous cast of characters – humans, cats, mice, and other animals, to enact a meditation on themes of displacement, alienation, and entrapment. His large-scale photographic works play on photography’s traditional role to reflect the society in which they were made, as well as the technical virtuosity that typically accompanies the medium. Rather than using photography as a direct document, he creates unique works that are the product of private in the darkroom in which Falapishi manipulates the surface of photosensitive paper with flashlights and direct exposure to light. Cartoonish in appearance, his compositions reflect not a process of deskilling, but are instead the results of the constraints of darkness, and the limitations of his own body. Falapishi’s characters are placed within seemingly generic architectural environments, such as houses, fences, or other barriers, the figures’ interactions quickly take on resonance with familiar social hierarchies – the power structures within society, ideas of ownership and residence, and inside versus outside. These figures appear to revel in their own personal vices, confusing the morality implied by the traditional roles they assume. Often engaging in a tongue-in-cheek violence, which carries over to Falapishi’s sculptural and installation-based works, his characters reflect how tenuous and fragile the familiar structures of our society can be, and a shared fear of isolation.

In 2022, CCA Goldsmith’s London presented the first institutional exhibition of Falapishi’s work in Europe, As Free As Birds. Additionally, In 2022, Power Station, Dallas presented the solo exhibition Young and Clueless. Falapishi’s work was recently included in the 2022 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, Greater New York 2021, MoMA PS1, New York, 100 Drawings from Now at The Drawing Center, New York, 2020, In Practice: Total Disbelief, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, 2020, and Open Call, The Shed, New York, 2019. Falapishi received his MFA in Photography from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in 2016. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and MoCA, Los Angeles.

Koushna Navabi (b.1962, Tehran) is an Iranian-born American-British artist. She completed her MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London and now lives and works in London.

Navabi’s practice encompasses sculpture, installation, and painting with a focus on textiles. Her wry use of “feminine” techniques explores the interplay between the personal and the socio-political utilizing an expressively ironic code that draws heavily on cultural myths around Orientalism and gender identity.

The work, with its distinct focus on the three-dimensional form interlaces sexuality with politics, evoking tender, and sensual nuances of horror. She often combines textile media including traditional Persian kilims with sculpted or found objects, and her use of craft technique with its strong references to folkloric primitivism function to illuminate the dreadful alienation that hangs over so much of the work.

Navabi’s work has been featured in selected group exhibitions including Stitched. Ordovas Gallery, London UK (2022); In the Artist’s Room. Ordovas Gallery, London UK (2021) Crocodile Cradle. Peer Gallery, London UK (2021); O Sole Mio Issue 06. (Online exhibition) Parasol Unit (2020); The Spark is You. Parasol Foundation. Parasol Unit, London, UK (2019); The Spark is You. Parasol Foundation. Collateral exhibition at Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2019); In The Field of Empty Days. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles, CA (2018); Hiroshima Art Document, Hiroshima, Japan (2006). Craft. Richard Salmon Gallery, London & Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. (1998). The Whitechapel Open, London (1996).

Solo exhibitions include Koushna Navabi, Xerxes Gallery, London, UK (2009); Koushna Navabi, Percy Miller Gallery, London, UK (2001).

Anahita Razmi is a German Iranian visual artist who works with installation, sculpture, moving images and performance, often research-based and in collaboration. Her video, installation and performance works focus on issues of identity and gender and examine processes of cultural appropriation in which the meanings of existing images, artefacts and thus identities are put into question by situating them in another context. Razmi often uses strategies of disarrangement to consider structures of perception within consumer and pop culture against the background of contextual and geographical shifts between a ‘West’ and an ‘East’. The Islamic Republic of Iran, with its current political and social conditions and relations, remains an open, ambivalent point of reference.

Razmi studied at Bauhaus-University Weimar, Pratt Institute New York and State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart. Her works have been exhibited at international institutions including, Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Halle 14, Leipzig, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria; Sazmanab Center for Contemporary Art, Tehran; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; The National Art Center; Tokyo, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; and within the 55th Venice Biennale.

She has been the recipient of the Goethe at LUX Residency, London (2018), the Werkstattpreis of the Erich Hauser Foundation (2015), the MAK-Schindler Scholarship, Los Angeles (2013) and the Emdash Award, Frieze Foundation (2011).

Abbas Zahedi (b.1984, London, UK), studied medicine at University College London before completing his MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins in 2019. Abbas blends contemporary philosophy, poetics, and social dynamics with performative and new-media modes. With an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave, Abbas makes connections whenever possible with people involved in the particular situations he focuses on.

Selected exhibitions include: Metatopia 10013, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); The London Open 2022, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Postwar Modern, Barbican, London (2022); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); Temporary Compositions, Gallery 31 Somerset House, London (2021); Yarmonics 2021, Great Yarmoth, UK (2021); D.E.VALUATION, Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier (2021); 11 & 1, Belmacz, London (2021); Governmental Fires, FUTURA, Prague (2021); In Hindsight…, Bladr, Copenhagen (2020); Ouranophobia SW3, Chelsea Sorting Office, London (2020); How To Make A How From A Why?, Fire Station, South London Gallery, London (2020); Degree Show, Central Saint Martins, London (2019); The Age of New Babylon, Lethaby Gallery, London (2018); Diaspora Pavilion, (ICF), Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2018); appetite, Apiary Studios, London (2018); Diaspora Pavilion, (ICF), Palazzo Pisani a Santa Marina, Venice (2017); rb&hArts, Royal Brompton Hospital, London (2008).

Selected interventions, projects and performances include: Frieze Artist Award commission, London, (2022); Sonic Support Group, with Neurofringe (2020 – ongoing); Radio Amnion, Technical University of Munich (2021); Becontree Forever, Create London (2021); Brick Lane Foundation, Whitechapel Gallery (2021); A Case of Med(dling)tation, Performance Exchange at Belmacz (2021); To The Sour Sowers, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2021); The Urgency of The Arts Assembly, Royal College of Art (2021); Soul Refresher, Brent Biennial, London Borough of Culture (2020); Long Table: Lament, South London Gallery (2020); AMRA, Spike Island, Bristol (2019); Rose & STEMM, Guest Projects, London (2019); Outset Grant Ceremony, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); The Boulevard, Tate Britain, London (2018); Studio Jum’ah, Tate Exchange, London (2018); #FakeBooze, Diaspora Pavilion, Venice (2017).

Abbas has been the recipient of numerous awards including: the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists (2021); the Serpentine Galleries’ Support Structures for Support Structures (2021); Artangel, Thinking Time (2020); Jerwood Arts Bursary (2019); Aziz Foundation Academic Scholarship (2018); and Khadijah Saye Memorial Fund Scholarship (2017).

Abbas is an associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art (London), as well as teaching at universities across the UK and abroad.