At Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna, Mneme (2026) rests beneath the tree. Unclothed, reclining. Her front legs support her upper body as her torso stretches across an Indian silk carpet depicting cypress, the Tree of Life. Her head is raised, slightly angled. The carpet’s threads weave from her body into her fibrous hands, where a bowl of water rests as an offering.
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| Noushin Redjaian, tree of life, view of the exhibition at Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna, 2026. Photo by Katharina Schiffl. Courtesy Contemporary Lynx. |
by Klara Bender, Contemporary Lynx
Her reclining pose recalls Narcissus, whose absorption in his own reflection separates him from the world beyond it. Between self-recognition and self-enclosure, Mneme inhabits a similarly ambiguous position, though her relationship with the water opens onto another possibility. Rather than remaining caught in reflection, she speaks to the water, offering it a story that will reach the tree and nourish its blossoms. The words on the wall extend this invitation: “Would you like to lie down with me for a moment? With me, beneath the tree. I have lips, and I have a tongue. I tell the water a story, and the tree will drink it, little by little, for its blossom buds” — an excerpt from Tree of Life, a poem written by the Vienna-based artist Noushin Redjaian.
In her practice, she brilliantly choreographs a dance of reciprocity — between bodies, generations, worlds and materials. From reference to making, her work reveals a profound depth of thought and sensitivity. Her background in fashion, design, printmaking, and transmedia art informs a practice that moves fluidly between material, image and space.
Textiles That Remember
In Tree of Life water becomes a medium of exchange. The tree, in turn, becomes a confidant, a place where secrets can be held and transformed into something that sustains life. Mneme’s encounter marks a shift from fear to sharing, learning and discovering her place in the world. She recognises herself as an individual while carrying the knowledge of earlier generations. Inheritance does not determine her path; it gives her something from which to begin.
The tree is assembled from fragments of Iranian Gabbeh, Afghan Kazak, Indo-Modern, Nepalese Himalayan, and Turkish patchwork rugs. It evokes the Tree of Life, a meeting point between the earthly and unseen across Kabbalah and Western mythology. Other memories gather here, too: Yggdrasil, the world ash; Eve’s tree; the sacred trees of Mesopotamia. The tree is a living manifestation of the Sefirot — receiving through breath and resonance, through what passes between bodies.
Around them, hands and drops take shape through the textures of kilim rugs from Iran, Pakistani rugs, and Indian Silk carpet from the city of Kashmir. These textiles carry traces of thousands of years of Indo-Persian cultural exchange, their patterns preserving layers of meaning across generations. Miribota motifs, protective symbols such as the evil eye, and floral forms embody the desire for protection and the continuity of life. Crystals grown on their surfaces seal fleeting moments of human experience, arresting them within mineral formations. Nothing here is incidental: each textile is carefully sourced, each crystal coaxed into being.
Memory is central to Redjaian’s work: how symbols acquire meaning, how memory embeds itself in material, and how inner experiences move between concealment and visibility. Having learned traditional carpet-restoration techniques from her parents, Redjaian approaches woven surfaces as repositories of personal histories, inherited gestures and cultural knowledge. She extends this understanding into a sculptural and spatial language in which carpet fragments, organic forms, and mythological references enter into dialogue. Heritage is not fixed or preserved at a distance, but reworked as a living inheritance. This is reflected in Redjaian’s transformation of discarded carpet fragments into crystalline forms whose surfaces gradually reveal their origins. Through crystallisation, discarded materials acquire new meaning, evoking the role of minerals and stone as carriers of human knowledge and memory.
The Eye That Protects and Wounds
Redjaian is particularly attuned to protective symbols across spiritual and religious traditions, unsettling inherited associations and opening them to reinterpretation. The Hamsa and the evil eye serve as points of departure for exploring the shifting boundaries between protection, belief and vulnerability.
In To See Clearly (2024), the eye, a recurring symbol across cultures, raises questions of perception and trust. Embodying the ambivalence of the gaze, the evil eye can both empower and wound. Redjaian explores the gaze as a form of power that operates through patriarchal structures, everyday expectations and internalised judgments, in which women themselves can become agents of scrutiny and control, as well as through racial and cultural hierarchies that reduce complex histories to fixed identities and stereotypes. The gaze is never neutral: it shapes who is recognised, who belongs, and whose histories remain excluded from view. Against such reduction, Redjaian’s use of historical Persian carpets asserts the complexity of cultural memory and inherited knowledge. The carpets are not merely decorative: they carry artisanal traditions and histories whose meanings shift across contexts and generations.
She draws on the Persian association between harmful envy and the “salty eye”, incorporating crystals to create eyes that appear at once precious and damaged, protective and threatening. Filling the space of Bildraum 01 in Vienna, the eyes evoke the ambivalence of the gaze, while the crystals recall both the bodily intimacy of tears and emotion, and the ancient role of salt in preservation. In that same space, two female figures — Desire, seated, and Extasia, lying. They embody experiences often associated with shame, prohibition and control for women living within restrictive social and cultural norms. In contrast to the multitude of eyes surrounding them, neither figure has eyes of her own, though the eye-like forms may initially resemble smartphones, hinting at how digital realities have reshaped the conditions of visibility.
Their faces remain withdrawn from the world of looking and being looked at — a refusal to participate in an evaluative gaze. The carpets introduce another dimension to this withdrawal. Their patterns extend across the figures like a second skin, displacing the visual markers through which bodies are read and identities assigned. Replacing human skin with textile motifs, the figures resist reduction to immediately recognisable categories. The woven surfaces complicate the gaze rather than satisfy its desire to classify, leaving room for identities and histories that exceed what can be seen.
Ultimately, Noushin Redjaian asks what it means to inherit without being bound, to be seen without being defined, and to remember without remaining in the past. Her figures, materials and words inhabit the space between concealment and revelation, protection and exposure, self-recognition and openness to others.
See images here
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