Tirdad Hashemi
Artist
Biography
Tirdad Hashemi (b. 1991, Tehran) has been drawing for as long as they can remember. Growing up in an environment where personal and emotional difficulties were rarely voiced, drawing became a way to say what could not be spoken, and this reliance on image-making as communication still shapes a practice that has moved from coded gestures to more direct forms of address. Hashemi's largely figurative works are rendered with crudeness and immediacy, favouring honesty over polish and returning to the intuitive visual language we all spoke as children. Grounded in lived experience, the drawings foreground queer embodiment and togetherness, recording the everyday negotiations and acts of care that become political when lived in a queer body. Titles drawn from a long-standing letter-writing practice extend the drawings and make their messages explicit. Collaboration is central to Hashemi's work. The ongoing Flower series, developed with their partner Soufia Erfanian, grew out of a period spent growing and tending plants: layered oil pastel compositions in which flowers, as symbols of resilience, surround characters drawn from the artists' circle of loved ones, reflecting on how care and mutual support are sustained under precarious conditions.