Hanie Rahimian and Shiva Abazariyan are an emerging Iranian artist duo from Mashhad whose collaborative practice spans sculpture, paper mache, ceramics, installation, and animation. Working between painting‑based drawing and three‑dimensional forms, they blend humor, introspection, and material experimentation to offer fresh perspectives on contemporary Iranian art.
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| Courtesy Emaho. |
Emaho: You both grew up in Mashhad. How has the city, its energy, and your childhood environment influenced the way you perceive the world and eventually led you toward art?
Hanieh: Shiva and I both grew up in Mashhad, a crowded city full of contradictions. Our childhood took shape in a religious and ritualistic environment, yet my family was neither religious nor traditional and had a strong interest in art. My father was particularly passionate about art, especially music. My mother was a teacher who decorated her classroom walls with drawings, and I vividly remember how she would often draw small illustrations for me in the corners of my notebooks. Those images became my first encounters with drawing and sparked my early interest in visual art.
Shiva: My family, like Hanieh’s, was not traditional or religious. They were deeply interested in art and encouraged me from a young age to pursue it. My father and brother were involved in music, and my mother painted. I was always an observer of their practices. I remember my mother drawing for me while telling stories, and sometimes my brother and I would draw directly on the walls of our home. These simple, everyday moments naturally placed me on this path.
Emaho: Can you recall the moment when each of you was first drawn to sculpture? How were your initial encounters with three-dimensional forms and materials during your youth?
Shiva: My encounter with volume and form was more instinctive than deliberate—working with forms that could be shaped, altered, and even destroyed. The possibility of making mistakes, returning, and starting again was deeply appealing to me. Both Hanieh and I studied painting, but alongside it we closely followed the work of various sculptors and were curious about their processes. This shared curiosity led us, during a university project, to create a joint sculptural work together. That became our first collaborative artwork. Gradually, we realized that sculpture offered broader possibilities for realizing our ideas, and that new tools and materials opened up opportunities for experimentation.
Hanieh: Building, assembling, and arranging objects with the intention of creating something meaningful has always fascinated me. At first, my world was limited to painting, but over time, especially during my studies, as I became familiar with more techniques and materials and developed a deeper understanding of form, composition, and color, I began to move beyond the brush and canvas and experiment with new tools and materials to create different forms.
Emaho: Your practice now spans sculpture, papier-mâché, ceramics, installations, and even animation. How did this appetite for working across diverse media develop for each of you?
Hanieh: For us, sculpture, painting, animation, and other media are tools for conveying ideas. Sometimes an idea works best as a sculpture; other times, painting offers better possibilities. Each sculptural technique brings its own limitations and potentials. For example, papier-mâché allows us to create large-scale volumes that remain lightweight and durable, with a texture that gives the work a distinct visual quality. Ceramics, on the other hand, create smooth, polished, and luminous surfaces with a completely different presence. What particularly attracts us to ceramics is its unpredictability—colors and textures change after firing depending on temperature, chemical compositions, and other conditions. This uncertainty is very compelling to us.
Hanieh: In sculpture, movement can only be suggested to a certain extent, which creates limitations. We found a solution to this challenge through animation—a medium closely connected to drawing and imagery, our initial interests, while also offering strong narrative possibilities. We try not to confine ourselves to a specific medium or style and instead keep space open for new experiences.
Emaho: What sparked your decision to collaborate as a duo, and what does this partnership provide that working individually could not?
Shiva: Through years of friendship, collaboration, shared conversations, and experiences, our artistic sensibilities and personalities grew very close. We had a shared studio in Tehran, and at first we felt our works were influencing each other too strongly, so we decided to work more independently for a while. About a year later, when we showed each other our works again, we noticed a striking similarity in atmosphere and sensibility. Growing up together, sharing the same environment and lifestyle, had deeply aligned our visual languages.
Hanieh: When I saw Shiva’s drawings, I was genuinely excited—it felt like during that year she had been thinking about the same ideas and questions that preoccupied me. After talking, we decided to organize our ideas more coherently and move toward a shared body of work, which resulted in a series titled Available. From that point on, we continued our artistic practice collaboratively.
Emaho: In the studio, how does your collaborative process work? Are there fixed roles or preferred materials, or is it more fluid with ideas and hands constantly overlapping?
Shiva: Roles in our studio are not fixed. Sometimes one of us initiates an idea and the other develops it; sometimes it’s the opposite. We go through all stages together, from concept to execution. Ideas may emerge through conversation, drawing, or everyday life. Our goal is to follow a shared process without rigid boundaries, while remaining attentive to each other’s strengths and weaknesses to achieve a stronger final outcome.
Hanieh: We don’t divide the process into strict sections. However, in broader structural stages—like creating the initial framework or defining the main form—Shiva often takes the lead due to her holistic way of thinking. My approach is more detail-oriented, so I focus more on character development, faces, and fine details. These differences give us space to trust one another and move the work forward collaboratively.
Emaho: Your exhibition Get It Before You Forget It attracted significant attention. What was the main idea behind this show, and how did you translate it into sculpture and installation?
Hanieh: In the years leading up to this exhibition, many concerns occupied my mind. I used to keep a notebook where I set deadlines for my goals and plans. Often, when those dates passed, my motivation faded and the ideas were gradually forgotten. At some point, I decided to change my approach—to enjoy the effort and the path itself, regardless of outcomes or fixed timelines. The exhibition emerged from these personal experiences, though each of us related to them differently.
Hanieh: In Get It Before You Forget It, we created a fictional world inhabited by blue human-like figures obsessed with reaching a silver pear. The silver color represented a sense of value and later became an inseparable element in our work. The focus of the exhibition was on process—a process in which desire, movement, and longing mattered more than the final result.
Shiva: During the formation of this series, my own personal mental concerns played a major role. I felt an intense desire to reach things whose attainment was uncertain, yet I chose movement over stillness. I followed the path itself and approached it with curiosity, using it as a way to search for myself.
Emaho: Your works often combine humor, fragility, and emotional memory. What kinds of narratives or inner worlds are you most interested in exploring through these hybrid forms?
Shiva: Many ideas emerge in relaxed settings, often through casual and humorous conversations. Everyday experiences can suddenly unlock a character or a deeper theme. Humor grows out of daily life and naturally appears in our work. External elements also play a significant role—natural forms, especially in our recent series Dourdast (Faraway), were a major source of inspiration.
Emaho: Papier-mâché and ceramics are sometimes considered humble or traditional materials. What draws you to these, and how do you push their boundaries in contemporary art?
Hanieh: A material may appear traditional due to its history or conventional use, but art has the power to break these limitations. I try to prioritize my personal perspective when using a technique. For me, material is simply a tool for expressing ideas. What matters most is how much space it creates for translating what exists in my mind into form.
Shiva: I believe papier-mâché and ceramics each enable a distinct mode of expression. Papier-mâché gives me speed and freedom—I can easily add to it and change forms and colors. Ceramics, by contrast, demands patience and risk-taking. Glazes and colors feel like a kind of alchemy, with outcomes that continually surprise me. Eventually, we realized that combining these two materials could amplify the strengths of each. This new possibility played an important role in developing our ideas and was central to our recent exhibition.
Emaho: How does animation enter your practice, and what possibilities does it offer that a static sculpture cannot?
Hanieh: Get It Before You Forget It was a narrative-based exhibition. In one part, we presented a looping sequence in which a character goes through various stages but never reaches the goal, and the cycle begins again. For me, animation was the best medium to convey repetition. Animation is rooted in drawing, which has always been my primary interest. Although the animation we produced was handmade and time-consuming, it was deeply enjoyable, and I had long wanted to include this experience in my practice.
Shiva: What fascinated me most was how animation allows the same forms and characters from our sculptures to enter time. I could give them movement and build a continuous story. What remains static and frozen in sculpture gains the chance to breathe in animation. The frame-by-frame drawing process—and how small changes accumulate into a coherent movement—was particularly compelling to me. I see these two media as complementary: sculpture finds meaning in physical space, while animation gives the same form meaning through time. Presenting them together was not simply a combination of media, but an attempt to create a unified spatial experience.
Emaho: Looking across your exhibitions, is there a particular work or moment that feels like a turning point in your collaborative journey? What made it pivotal?
Shiva: During our MFA studies in Tehran, we shared a studio and frequently traveled between Tehran and Mashhad—a rhythm that continues even now. In Tehran, we held our first duo exhibition titled Available at Soo Gallery. It included individual paintings alongside a collaborative installation of small sculptures and drawings. This exhibition became a turning point that solidified our decision to continue working together.
Emaho: What new projects are you working on right now, and which material experiments excite you the most?
Hanieh: At the moment, we are primarily focused on ceramic sculpture. The wide range of ceramic techniques continues to excite me. At the same time, we are always open to experimenting with different materials. Our shared interest in painting has also led us to plan collaborative paintings for our next series.
Emaho: As two Iranian artists working collaboratively in a shifting global landscape, what do you hope audiences take away from your work—regarding memory, the body, or contemporary life?
Hanieh: Our works emerge from our personal identities, thoughts, and experiences. I believe an artist is, above all, a storyteller. This narrative can be social, political, cultural, or deeply personal. Iran is a place where unexpected events constantly occur—events that become embedded in collective memory and unconsciously surface in my work. Living in such a context creates a unique experience filled with both possibilities and challenges. While I often focus on personal and individual concerns, my aim is to create works that reflect my lived experience as a human being rather than convey a single, fixed message. In this sense, my body becomes a reflection of the society I live in.
Shiva: For me, memory and the body are not abstract concepts; they are present in everyday life. Collective experiences—especially those shaped by social, historical, or political contexts—have a profound impact and manifest in the body through anxiety and a sense of suspended futures. For example, during our recent exhibition, the twelve-day war in Iran suddenly occurred and caused the opening to be postponed. This delay was not merely logistical; our bodies entered a state of instability and anxiety, which deeply affected our mental state. Conversations between Hanieh, myself, and those around us played a crucial role in processing these events. We constantly discussed how such situations affect the mind and body, particularly from the position of being artists. Ultimately, we hope that rather than leaving with a clear message, audiences will sense this shared mental state. If our works can transmit this lived experience—even subtly—that is enough for us.
See images here
Via Emaho
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