Dubai · 23/09/2026
I Bloom Where You Hold Me
Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian
Bodies gather and cling to one another within unruly fields of flowers, forming constellations of intimacy. I Bloom Where You Hold Me at Gallery Isabelle brings together collaborative works from Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian's ongoing Flower series, unfolding across gallery walls covered in hand-drawn graffiti. Rooted in the artists' shared and individual experiences, the works ask what it means to care for, sustain and grow alongside one another. Made primarily in oil pastel on paper, the drawings develop through an intuitive process and a rough, immediate visual language. Flowers are built from loose, gestural marks; colours bleed, and figurative scenes appear like small windows set into wild fields. These intimate scenes are drawn from real moments of care and togetherness in the artists' lives — figures sitting side by side, leaning into one another, embracing or simply sharing space — preserving gestures of friendship and chosen family. Their poetic titles, rooted in a long-standing practice of letter writing, open up the space of private correspondence and extend the exchange between the two artists to everyone who encounters the work. I Bloom Where You Hold Me grows out of this condition of being together, and out of the possibility that we might become softer without becoming less resilient — that caring for another can itself be a way of enduring.