by Stirling Kain.

I’ve always felt that virtue lay in obtaining what was out of one’s reach, in living where one isn’t, […] in overcoming – like an obstacle – the world’s very reality.

The dreams of Yasamin Khadembashi are not idle interludes between waking hours. Her dreams are (in equal parts) strained and cathartic extensions outwards. Indeed, she dedicates this exhibition to her parents’ flight from Iran, pursuing “…the possibility that their children could grow in a country where they would be free.”[1] It could be argued that Khadembashi materialises her own dreams by supplementing cultural erasure with artistic excess: this is where we arrive at Dreaming in Farsi.
        Her first solo exhibition, Dreaming in Farsi is the culmination of Khadembashi’s residency at Pakenham Street Arts Space. This gallery—large, open, concrete-grey—can be challenging, especially for emerging artists. Khadembashi has achieved an exhibition that feels balanced and full with only eighteen two-dimensional works.
        Sometimes artists use experimental methods to disguise a lack of technical aptitude—the kind involved in the presentation of fully resolved work. This is not the case with Khadembashi. She is immediately recognisable as an accomplished figurative oil painter, exploring with sculptural impasto and novel materials (including synthetic eyelash extensions and rhinestones).
        At the end of my first walkthrough of the exhibition, I notice none of the works are framed. They don’t need them. The variance in the scale of works (from 15.5cm up to 197cm) indicates that she is a confident painter seeking to create a diverse body of work. Khadembashi relishes the medium, embracing both its opportunities and its challenges, but does not overly rely on scale, frames, or experimentation to elevate her works.
        At the exhibition’s opening, audiences consistently gravitate towards the larger-than-life-sized Immoral Warrior. Khadembashi is topless, floating in air, stepping towards the viewer, and wielding flaming, rhinestone-emblazoned paddles. Bold and surreal, the work is reminiscent of Julie Rrap’s 1984 cibachrome print series Persona & Shadow.[2] Immoral Warrior re-imagines some of the values invigorating Rrap’s work with new intersectionality: Khadembashi is fat and Australian-Iranian, where Rrap is thin and white. In the artist’s own words: “These paintings embody the queer, the camp, the fat, the feminine, the masculine, the grotesque, the beautiful, the powerful, the big, the vulnerable, the bold.”[3]
        In a phone call, Khadembashi conveys (with urgency) the frustration she feels at the opinions of some left-leaning commentators as they look upon protests in Iran. She emphasises nuance. She describes an example where Iranian protesters set fire to a mosque. These are not thoughtless expressions of violence, but protests to demand freedoms from their government. The prioritisation of nuance is clear in her works, too. Dreaming in Farsi balances earnestness and defiance, demanding reflection and attention. Ultimately, the works foreground representation exclusively on Khadembashi’s own terms. In Don’t Act Suspicious, florid designs border a woman wearing a burqa, with a red-and-white target on her torso. Her gaze and body face the viewer, who must shuffle around to read the tiny words across her clothing, scored into the surface of the paint. The work requires the audience to meet the subject. She stands as a target of Islamophobia, but is neither dangerous, nor pitiable—rather, steadfast and individual. Indeed, Khadembashi says that “these works ask to be witnessed rather than consumed.”[4]
        Rorschach Miniature (31.5cm x 42.5cm, two canvases) is perhaps my favourite work. The surfaces of this diptych are thick with lashings of purple, red, peach, and blue oil paint. The two portraits are mirrors of one another, the featureless faces extending and pointing towards each other. The impasto is so abundant that it almost bridges the gap between the two canvases. The work conveys longing, discomfort, and a density of feeling.
        Khadembashi says she was influenced by Ben Quilty’s Rorschach paintings. She paints on canvas, then presses upon that surface a plain canvas of the same size, and usually repeats this pressing and pulling. Khadembashi describes this as a visual metaphor of immigration and assimilation—an image that was once present is irrevocably changed through repeated pressing and pulling. The artist’s experiments with oil paints are a material expression of the role of erasure and loss in the complex and sometimes contradictory unfolding of her Australian-Iranian identity. 
        When first entering the exhibition, audiences encounter a group of earlier works, created in 2022 and 2023. On the next wall, Immoral Warrior (2025) sits between Dyke (2025) and Patterned No. 1 (2024), all of which primarily include piped impasto oil paint. Towards the end of the show, the works Insomnia, Three Sisters, and Faceless (all 2022) depict ghostly, photo-negative portraits markedly different from the rest of the works. These curatorial choices diverge from my own tastes: perhaps the different chronological and thematic clusters that comprise the show could have been better integrated and reconciled by interspersing them less linearly. This might have facilitated a sense of the works looping back on themselves—forming additional visual connections between paintings that are not physically next to each other—rather than the linear-leaning storytelling mode Khadembashi has adopted.
        That being said, the artist should be commended for the breathing room she provides each work. A common pitfall for emerging artists curating their own exhibitions is to jam in as many works as possible, because they are deeply connected to each piece and cannot bear any omission. Khadembahsi uses the space between paintings as a collaborator: a critical component to distinguishing each work.
        Dreaming in Farsi combines painterly experimentation with technical excellence, bringing vernacular materials and Australian-Iranian subjectivity to the long tradition of oils. The love and labour Khadembashi pours into each work is tangible. This selection of paintings have a rare quality, providing instantaneous aesthetic pleasure—with their luscious impasto on canvas surfaces—while rewarding longer study.

Yasamin Khadembashi, Dreaming in Farsi, Pakenham Street Arts Space, 17–31 January.

---

Footnotes:

1. Dreaming in Farsi | Yasamin Khadembashi (exhibition catalogue), 2026.

2. Julie Rrap, Persona & Shadow, cibachrome prints, 1984. https://www.julierrap.com/work/persona-and-shadow

3. Dreaming in Farsi | Yasamin Khadembashi (exhibition catalogue), 2026.

4. Dreaming in Farsi | Yasamin Khadembashi (exhibition catalogue), 2026.

---

Image credits:

1. Yasamin Khadembashi, Rorschach Miniature, 31.5cm x 42.5cm, two canvases. Courtesy of the artist.

2. Yasamin Khadembashi , Immoral-Warrior (install documentation). Courtesy of the artist.

3. Yasamin Khadembashi , Immoral Warrior (detail). Courtesy of the artist.

Photos by Adam Kenna.