After acclaimed editions in London (Frieze No.9 Cork Street, 2022) and Toronto (Zaal Art Gallery, 2023), “Soft Edge of the Blade” arrives in Dubai for its third and most ambitious chapter. The exhibition gathers artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, and hybrid media to examine violence in its many forms—visible and invisible, personal and collective.
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| Mehrdad Mohebali, Untitled, 2025, Acrylic on canvas. 130 x 331 cm. Courtesy the artist, Leila Heller Gallery and Dreamideamachine Art View. |
by Efi Michalarou, Dreamideamachine Art View
The exhibition “Soft Edge of the Blade Vol. 3” expands beyond the familiar narratives of war and political oppression to address subtler forms of “soft” violence: migration, diaspora, patriarchy, family structures, gender, censorship, and the weaponization of language in digital spaces. By situating these inquiries within the Middle East, the exhibition highlights how history, tradition, and memory can themselves carry traces of violence.
Audiences are invited to engage with works that oscillate between the symbolic and the visceral, asking not only how violence manifests but whether we recognize it at all. In the words of Elie Wiesel, whose reflection guides the project: “Questions unite people. It is the answers that divide them.”
From London to Toronto, “Soft Edge of the Blade” has traced the contours of violence across continents. Now, in Dubai, the series unfolds its most expansive act yet. Here, in a region whose very name—“the Middle East”—is entangled with a vocabulary of conflict, the exhibition turns inward. It asks: what if the violence we dread is already within us, hidden in memory, ornament, tradition, even beauty?
The artists assembled speak in many tongues—painting, sculpture, photography, hybrid media—yet their voices converge on a single question: how does violence seep softly into our lives? Their works move between intimacy and rupture, between the symbolic and the visceral, touching on censorship, domesticity, resistance, and the fragile architectures of identity.
This is not a show about war alone. It is about the quieter violences of migration, patriarchy, language, and history’s lingering weight. It is about the blade that cuts invisibly, the wound that is felt but not seen.
In its refusal to provide answers, “Soft Edge of the Blade Vol. 3” honors Wiesel’s reminder that questions unite us. The exhibition becomes less a statement than an invitation—to contemplate, to doubt, to recognize the violence that shapes us, softly.
Reza Aramesh draws inspiration from media coverage of international conflicts dating from the mid-20th century until present day. This coverage is then transformed into sculptural volumes in collaboration with non-professional models, who help him reenact his chosen source materials. No direct signs of war remain in the physical end results and the characters seem driven out of their initial contexts. Opposition between beauty and brutality allows the artist to unveil the absurdity and the futility of these actions. Aramesh de-contextualises these scenes of violence from their origins, exploring the narratives of representation and iconography of the subjected male body in the context of race, class and sexuality in order to create a critical conversation with the western art historical canon.
Fereydoun Ave is an influential figure in Iranian contemporary art. his workis a freehanded engagement with a personal ethos informed by larger cultural influences. He ceaselessly reflects on various facets of his relationship with age, myths, plants, elements, seasons, moods, and heredity. He takes inspiration from the art of Iran, which tends to use the entire surface of the canvas, and the Western penchant for minimalism, which leaves large swaths unattended. Fereydoun Ave’s joint projects with artists, galleries (including Dastan), and institutions are an integral part of his practice, finding expression in his role as a curator, gallerist, and collector.
Maryam Ayeen and Abbas Shahsavar are an Iranian artist duo whose collaborative practice is rooted in the visual language of Persian miniature painting. While their technical approach draws on the delicate brushwork and compositional refinement of traditional book arts, their subject matter is distinctly contemporary – angling from scenes of middleclass life and domestic interiors to psychological, social, and political tensions embedded within private experience. Their joint works often depict suspended moments within staged interiors, using recurring motifs and symbolic elements to explore themes such as routine, control, and isolation. The pair works closely on all aspects of the painting process, merging perspectives to develop a cohesive visual language marked by compositional density and formal precision. Their practice resists nostalgia, instead positioning miniature painting as a living form capable of addressing present-day realities through sustained attention to medium, form, and shared authorship.
Homa Delvaray is an Iranian graphic designer and visual artist living and working in Tehran. Since earning a degree in Visual Communication from the University of Tehran (2006), she has extended her work across a variety of mediums, from installation to sculpture, textile art to artist book. Her practice activates the overlap of graphic and stage design in a spatial framework. Her works, often presented as an installation of a group of objects, engages the architectural space using a combination of design and spatial strategies. A graphic designer by training Delvaray employs the tools she has at her disposal to research and present what she observes as the paradoxical life within the dichotomies found in the life of contemporary Iranians. Her recent series investigates gender relations and how it has been formulated in mythological metaphors and tropes.
More than a sculptor, an installation artist, or ceramicist, engaged in some mystic relationship with her material, Bita Fayyazi is an artist who works within a more performative and markedly social practice. Bita Fayyazi struggled to show her work amidst an atmosphere of stuffy traditionalism, academicism, and the influx of 1990s conceptual art. Beginning in mid-1990s, her artistic interventions challenged the official definitions of art. Works of Fayyazi are collaborative by nature. She and her artist or non-artist colleagues use whatever material is readily available to wrap and entwine, paint and cast sculptures made of the fabric of social participation. She reconstitutes the energies of the many toward an uncertain resolution. The final object becomes less important than the process – the collective doing, the love of doing – that preceded its creation.
Throughout his career, Meghdad Lorpour’s subject matter has ranged from portraiture to landscape and still life, and his analytical approach to every aspect of his work has constantly evolved. He begins with a multi-layered phase of research, which includes deep dives into related literature, travel, documentation, and recording oral histories, and continues by exploring his recollections of the research process as sketches and experiments in technique and representation. After his early focus on portraiture, inspired by Persian mythology and Miniature Painting, Lorpour soon shifted towards looking at animals in their natural habitats, contextualizing them in his research on mythological history. More recently, he has focused on nature itself – landscapes and the different aspects of the natural environment. The artist has been meticulously looking at nature through certain points of view and sought to induce inner mythological layers to his settings while depicting natural scenery.
Farrokh Mahdavi is a painter renowned for his distinctive use of fleshy pink hues and thick layers of paint. His portraits often obscure facial features, focusing instead on elements like eyes or lips, aiming to create generalized depictions of humanity that transcend stereotypes of gender and race. In his deformative defamiliarization, he often leaves the eyes realistically painted, to the point some viewers think the eyes are collaged. This approach invites viewers to engage with the emotional world of his characters, prompting reflections on identity and the human condition. While his paintings may initially appear repetitive, this repetition is not incidental, but central to his practice. For those who follow his work closely, each painting reveals subtle yet meaningful variations.
In works of Mehrdad Mohebali, usually making a show on enormous canvases, people are excuted in a manneristic fashion. The artist’s early surreal scenes gave way to portraits of familiar political figures and scenes from art history next to those of the painter and ordinary people. His use of intense colors, lighting, and the poses of his subjects imbues his works with affectations and distortions.
Brooklyn-based artist Nicky Nodjoumi was born in Kermanshah, Iran in 1942. Earning a Bachelor’s degree in art from Tehran University of Fine Arts before relocating to the United States in the late 1960s, Nodjoumi received his Master’s degree in Fine Arts from The City College of New York in 1974. Returning to Tehran to join the faculty of his alma mater, Nodjoumi joined his politically galvanized students in their criticism of the Shah’s regime, designing political posters inspired by the revolutionary spirit sweeping the country, only to be exiled once more in the aftermath of the revolution. This political engagement has continued to the present day. His nuanced figurative paintings engage in political discourse with a light, satirical touch, layering his personal heritage and lived experiences in Iran and the United States into scenes that resonate beyond specific historical contexts or geographical boundaries. Nodjoumi’s works are conceived of as theatrical stages, where compositions of figures both serious and ridiculous, in the words of Phong Bui, “house meanings without irony, narratives without stories, humor without morality, above all creating a space that heightens the awareness of old and new history.” Serious in subject matter and witty in execution, these rich and diverse characters enliven Nodjoumi’s narratives and allude to collective experiences underpinned by socio- political struggles, articulating the full spectrum of feelings from aggression to victimhood.
Farah Ossouli is a painter working and living in Tehran. She received her BA in Graphic Design from the University of Tehran, where she taught between 1972 and 1987. She founded DENA, a female art collective that has organized over 30 exhibitions since 2001. She is a member of the Society of Iranian Painters. Farah Ossouli achieved a unique fusion of techniques, materials, themes, and narrations during her forty-year career as an artist. She has been a pioneer in introducing contemporary themes and ideas into miniature painting. The latest collections of Farah Ossouli are based on classical European paintings chosen by the artist based on their historical and conceptual relevance vis-à-vis the manifestation of violence in our world today. By transforming the medium (Persian painting) and figures (female holding the torch), Farah Ossouli is presenting the viewer with a new way of looking at the events taking place around us.
Morteza Pourhosseini creates meticulously rendered figurative works that draw on the visual language of Northern European religious iconography to frame contemporary subjects in moments of introspection and emotional ambiguity. In his series In-Between, solitary figures – often with lowered gazes, covered eyes, or pliant postures – appear poised on the threshold of an unseen event, caught between what has occurred and what has yet to unfold. These characters, distanced from narrative clarity, evoke themes of vulnerability, restraint, and quiet tension, with some figures becoming mere observers to an impending fall.
Mamali Shafahi is a filmmaker and visual artist known for his immersive, mixed-media installations that combine sound and light to create visual feasts adorned with enigmatic chimeras that defy categorization. His works reflect the complexities of cultural diversity and identity, shattering stereotypes and inviting viewers to explore the richness beneath the surface. Rooted in his Iranian heritage, they offer an escape into realms of fantasy, seamlessly blending the magical with the terrifying, and fantasy with horror, all within a mesmerizing world of optical illusions. As part of his long-term project “Daddy Sperm”, Shafahi created the experimental docu-fiction film Nature Morte, featuring his parents. This work became the backbone of an installation at City Princes/ses at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2019.
Participating Artists: Reza Aramesh, Pooya Aryanpour, Fereydoun Ave, Andisheh Avini, Maryam Ayeen and Abbas Shahsavar, Homa Delvaray, Reza Derakshani, Mehdi Farhadian, Bita Fayyazi, Marcos Grigorian, Ghasem Hajizadeh, Morteza Khosravi, Farideh Lashai, Meghdad Lorpour, Farrokh Mahdavi, Ardeshir Mohasses, Bahman Mohasses, Mehrdad Mohebali, Arash Nazari, Shirin Neshat, Nicky Nodjoumi, Farah Ossouli, Peybak, Morteza Pourhosseini, Mohammad Piryaee, Behrang Samadzadegan, Mamali Shafahi.
Info: Curator: Mamali Shafahi, Leila Hellar Gallery, I-87, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE, Duration: 10/11/2025-8/1/2026, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-19:00
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