To Measure the Emotions of Others

Golnar Adili’s Family Archive

Golnar Adili’s work at Smack Mellon, New York, embodies the desire to account for loss through art

Golnar Adili: To Measure the Emotions of Others, 2025 (installation view). Photo: Etienne Frossard. Courtesy Smack Mellon, New York and ArtReview.

by Louis Bury, ArtReview

‘If only one could measure the emotions of others,’ reads a letter sent from Golnar Adili’s mother in Iran to Adili’s father in the US. He was living there in exile as a result of the couple’s leftist activism in the years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. An enlarged reproduction of the letter, printed on pink Japanese paper, hangs towards Smack Mellon’s entrance like a state document in a history museum. In the main gallery, a 15-metre sculpture, Ye Harvest From the Eleven-Page Letter–Installation (2016), attempts something like the accounting Adili’s mother pined for. Attached to a dowel scaffold that resembles a model roller-coaster support, the artist has reproduced in archival cardboard every Persian ye character, which has the shape of a swooping check mark, from a long letter her father sent – not to her mother but to his US lover. As if by repeating the Persian alphabet’s terminal letter she might close this unsettling chapter of her family history.

This delicate row of repeating characters forms the exhibition’s figurative spine, an embodiment of the futile desire to account for loss through art. Ye Harvest… gives architectural form to text culled from the artist’s extensive, ongoing archive of family letters dating back to 1981, creating a kind of concrete poetry that renders script as sculptural gesture. Other text works in the show incorporate similar poetic techniques: the rumpled transfer print on Japanese paper, When All the Tears Filter Through the Forest of Alef and Collect in My Ocean of Ye (2016), for example, reproduces all the vertical alef characters (the first letter of the Persian alphabet) from the same love letter, the accumulation of which resembles a prisoner’s tally marks. Eleven-Page Letter Redaction (2016) emphasises disappearance, superimposing a sheet of paper, with apertures cut out, over a copy of the letter, to reveal glimpses of Persian words that use the ye character, with English translations of those words handwritten on the cover sheet.

All of You

Installation view: Andisheh Avini: All of You at Martos Gallery, New York, 2026. Courtesy Martos Gallery, Steven Probert Studio and The Brooklyn Rail.

by Ekin Erkan, The Brooklyn Rail

Iranian-American artist Andisheh Avini’s All of You consists of printed postcards, blown glass, steel sculptures, found objects, and sound as one immersive installation. To varying degrees, each of the works draws on Iranian/Persian leitmotifs as recollected by the artist. The structures are endowed with a mediated sense of cultural-historical remembrance as the assemblages, with their various connotations to Persian mythos, architecture, and decorative art history, are filtered through Avini’s episodic memory. Ultimately, it is less so Avini’s remembering that us viewers are able to participate in, foreclosed as we are to his phenomenology and biographical history; rather, the works’ strength is in their reconciling well-examined symbolic folk traditions.

There are several constituent series within the show, each of which requires cultural-anthropological explication to properly appreciate. That is, one should not be overly taken by the presence of twelve postcards, some of which depict Avini’s works and others which provide photographic glances of various Tehran semblances. For, while we are admittedly in the grips of Avini’s nostalgia here, there are also strictly sociological referents that have fixed reference. Without possessing a command of the latter, one is left spinning in the wheels of sheer aesthetics—delighting in the installed marquetry spines and glass organs by misinterpreting them as merely colorful delights. This is, however, to improperly retrofit formalism on Avini’s more layered art practice.

Iranian Artist Highlights The Long Resistance

At Ball and Socket Arts.

Mahsa Attaran, Sweep It Under the Rug. Courtesy Midbrow. 

by Brian Slattery, Midbrow

Mahsa Attaran's I Still Can See can seem at first like the latest piece in a long lineage of artists putting household objects on a gallery wall — pipes, bananas — and declaring them to be art. Attaran echoes that move, but adds a twist. Perhaps the grater first catches the eye, because the face on that one is the most visible, even if the face itself is half-covered. Then the other faces emerge on each of the other implements. The nod to the hiddenness of the work women do in the kitchen is on the surface. But it also matters where those faces are. On the grater, the face is where the most friction is. On the pan, the face is to the flames. There's violence there, too, oppression, difficulty.

I Still Can See, Attaran writes, is about transforming the objects "into potent symbols that expose the hidden struggles of women. By recontextualizing these familiar items, the work challenges the societal expectation that confines women to domestic roles, revealing how internalized oppression is woven into everyday life. It highlights the unsettling duality of the home: while it is traditionally seen as a sanctuary, for many women it can be a site of danger and threat, where the very spaces meant to nurture become arenas for control and violence. The work also addresses the harsh reality that many women are killed annually by male family members, often under the guise of preserving modesty or asserting ownership over women. This juxtaposition forces viewers to confront the complex interplay between domesticity and violence, urging a reexamination of the power dynamics that shape everyday life."