Hoda Kashiha’s first institutional exhibition in Europe takes its name from her recent series “I’m Here, I’m Not Here,” 2020–21. Developed across four canvases, the work repeats a motif pulled from an American postcard: a cartoonish rendition of a blonde girl in a pink top holding a daisy. The artist depicts the full figure just once. With each repetition, she obscures the appropriated form with swatches of red and black vinyl, ultimately draining it of all color in a cut-out version in white on white.

At the heart of this show is “In appreciation of Blinking,” 2021: eight large-scale paintings arranged in a line, each canvas fixed to its own metal stand on wheels. Kashiha’s There Is a Brick Wall, Bricks Are Broken, And She Falls, So Happy Birthday to All is positioned at the front, a juxtaposition of a hyperreal orchid blossom in full tropical color with an anime diver in black and white. This female silhouette is blurred with spray paint in an enhanced rendering of urgency and speed. The consecutive compositions are covered in a wash of black acrylic that descends lower on each canvas, like a falling curtain. By the last painting, Back as Black, the source composition is submerged entirely in black.

The work echoes not only Malevich’s Black Square, but also the social media response to Iran’s political uprisings in late 2017 and the more recent Blackout Tuesday, organized following the police killings of Black Americans Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Within Kashiha’s practice, the black square originated in an animated film she began during the first Covid lockdown, The Eyes Fill with Brightness Slip Over to the Black Shades, 2021. Shown here, the work is the young artist’s first video, a medium she’s long used to test compositions before placing them on canvas. On the tail of her one-month residency at this institution, Kashiha has allowed herself to reveal more of what happens inside her immense studio on the outskirts of Tehran, a place where she is making the mechanisms of invisibility seen.

— Lillian Davies