Mashid Mohadjerin - Spiraling Outward
28.02.2025
08.06.2025
In the exhibition Spiraling Outward, Iranian-Belgian artist Mashid Mohadjerin (b. 1976, Tehran) invites visitors into her universe – a delicate and personal interlacing of photography, installations, collage and text that blurs the conventional boundaries between documentary and art, between time and space, between fact and emotion.
Personal family chronicles fuse with far-reaching political events and are posited against the background of a broader history of the Middle East. Mohadjerin seeks out the invisible nuances hidden underneath the spectacular and the familiar. Spiraling Outward thus offers an alternative, multifaceted view on pressing issues such as migration, cultural transformation and resistance.
This will be the first showing of a selection from her series Riding in Silence (2025), which departs from Mohadjerin’s new artist’s book Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish. Large black and white photos, text and collages connect an account of forced migration to wider research into the way notions of masculinity relate to political ideology in a rapidly changing world, and what this means today.
Riding in Silence is a continuation of her acclaimed series Freedom is Not Free (2021), in which she explores the role of women during resistance in the context of the Middle East. Through personal archives and family narratives she presents five generations of women fighting for freedom.
Mohadjerin’s video installations Rapture, My Body, Every Body (2023) and Thumbs Up (2019), in the exhibition showing facing one another, explore the role of traditions and rituals in the context of resistance.
The recent installation Border Crossing (2024), a collaboration with composer Jan De Vroede, reflects on spatial boundaries and migration through image and sound.
About Mashid Mohadjerin
Multidisciplinary artist Mashid Mohadjerin (b. 1976, Tehran, Iran) obtained her doctorate in the Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2021.
Her work is shown internationally and has received multiple awards, including the Les Rencontres d’Arles Author’s Book Award for Freedom is Not Free (2021) and the first prize in the Contemporary Issues category of World Press Photo 2009. Mohadjerin previously published three books and during this exhibition will present her most recent artist’s book, Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025).
In the past years Mohadjerin has expanded her artistic practice to include collage, text, video, sound and performance. Her work weaves urgent socio-political themes together with broader history and personal stories.
Her work evokes questions regarding the way we relate to ourselves, one another, and the world around us in times of globalisation.
Mohadjerin’s newest artist’s book, Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025), is for sale at the FOMU shop.