Tirdad Hashemi

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 spoken about, drawing became a way to articulate what could not be said aloud. This early reliance on image-making as a form of communication continues to shape their practice, which began with coded gestures and evolved into more direct forms of address.

Hashemi’s largely figurative works are rendered with crudeness and immediacy. Their unpolished style resists aesthetic sophistication in favour of honesty. The artist reminds us that drawing is a language we all once spoke as children, before it was constrained by social expectation. In their work, Hashemi seeks to return to this uninhibited and intuitive mode of expression.

Grounded in lived experience, Hashemi’s works foreground queer embodiment and being in communion. Experiencing the world as a queer body, the everyday becomes inherently political. These daily negotiations and acts of care carry narratives that demand visibility, which the artist portrays in their drawings. Hashemi makes these stories more explicit through the titles of their works. Often originating from a long-standing letter-writing practice, they invite us into the intimate space of private correspondence. Acting as an extension of the drawings, the titles make the message of the artworks more clear rather than leaving room for interpretation.

Collaboration is a distinctive dimension of Hashemi’s practice. The ongoing Flower series, developed with their partner Soufia Erfanian, emerged from a period immersed in growing and tending to plants. The oil pastel drawings feature flowers, as symbols of resilience, in layered compositions populated by characters from the artist’s circle of loved ones. Positioning community as both subject and method, the works reflect on how care and mutual support are formed and sustained within conditions shaped by precarity.

Text by Yalda Bidshahri