Galleria Anna Marra is pleased to present Assemblages, a solo exhibition by Sepideh Salehi, curated by Laila Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, that will occupy the gallery's exhibition spaces from March 11th, 2026 to April 18th, 2026. The exhibition is the artist's first solo presentation at Galleria Anna Marra. It will feature a selection of work created over the past decade, rooted in collage, printmaking, and drawing, and Salehi's multilayered approach to imbuing memory, material, and transformation.

 

The genesis of Salehi's visual language is the artist's childhood and adolescent years in post-1979 revolutionary Tehran. Drawing on the fragmentation of being away from home and the acts of witnessing, collecting, and imagining physical and found history and images, the artist takes viewers on a journey between the past carried within her and the present she inhabits as an artist living in a globalized world.

 

Salehi's partially concealed female figures – mostly friends – float gesturally across her real and imagined landscapes of Iran and serve as the leading actors in her assemblages. Suspended in space, Salehi builds a world around and between them through layers of found photographs or drawn terrain, and the etched and rubbed pattern of ritualistic prayer stones, which come into conversation like a concerto through cutting, stacking, scanning, reassembling, and enlarging. Here, the act of covering is not restricted to women, but to the worlds that envelop them, inviting us to consider a broader story about the relationship between what is real and what is constructed politically, physically, and metaphorically. The result is a new reality where belonging, distance, and transformation can coexist.

 

For Salehi, physical and mental collection and reflection are the basis for her evolving constructions. Featured are early works such as her Mohr series, in which portraits of women in various poses, taken by the artist, are shrouded in the semi-transparent, patterned imagery of the calligraphy-inscribed stone, which is repeatedly rubbed, then scanned and enlarged. This act introduces language into her portraits and transforms the ritualistic stone into a visual rhythm. The artist's layering of photography, prayer stone inscriptions on Japanese paper, drawing and cut paper is made tangible in the eight small mixed-media works in her Transformation series. The artist's meticulous use of color, cut-paper silhouettes, and their inversions becomes increasingly evident as one travels from her early to her new work, in which all elements are scanned and presented in large scale on canvas. The once small female figure now swims within the skies, mountains, and flowers depicted.

 

There is a particular sensitivity in her portraits of fellow Iranians in the diaspora who reveal and conceal parts of themselves that is consistent throughout her work. Together, Salehi and her subjects create new avenues through which one can understand a place often misunderstood. Born of Iran’s real and imagined landscapes, they tenderly and increasingly playfully interact within her frame. For Salehi, the distance from her homeland has created an opportunity where memory and imagination fashion new roads to places not yet traveled.

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ITA

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