This collection is the result of a dialogue in which two artists redefine abandoned structures, symbolic animals, and industrial spaces in their own language. These works are not only reflections of the external world, but also echoes of an internal dialogue between two perspectives, two memories, and two lived experiences.
SARAI Gallery is pleased to present "Lived Duality", a two-person exhibition by Sadegh Khalife and Ghasem Mohammadi, bringing together two distinct painterly languages that converge in a shared inquiry into memory, structure, and transformation.
The exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between interior and exterior worlds - where industrial remnants, imagined terrains, and symbolic fragments serve as points of departure. Khalife and Mohammadi approach landscape not as representation, but as reconstruction: a site where personal memory and collective experience intersect.
In Sadegh Khalife's paintings, industrial structures and mechanical systems emerge as both witnesses and instruments of transformation. His works evoke a world where human progress manifests as intrusion - a process through which nature is continuously reshaped, exploited, and wounded. The rigid frameworks and engineered materials that populate his canvases speak of a fragile equilibrium, in which the drive for advancement leaves indelible marks upon the land. Rooted in his seventeen years of experience within industrial environments, Khalife's practice examines the moral and environmental consequences of modernization.
In his recent works, however, these structures are no longer mere symbols of machinery or industry; they become stages for an inner theatre, where matter, memory, and imagination converge. Within these provisional architectures - half shelter, half ruin - organic forms emerge as if nature were reclaiming its space from within the very systems that sought to contain it. Khalife transforms the industrial scaffold into a site of metamorphosis: what once served as a framework of control becomes a vessel of rebirth. Through this tension between rigidity and vitality, his paintings reveal a deeply human yearning - to reconcile creation and destruction, progress and decay.
By contrast, Ghasem Mohammadi envisions a different kind of coexistence. In his landscapes, architectural forms are seamlessly absorbed into their surroundings, appearing less as intrusions and more as natural extensions of the earth itself. Through a visual language he describes as "fantasy realism", Mohammadi constructs imagined spaces where human-made structures and organic forms coalesce, dissolving boundaries between civilization and nature. His compositions suggest a reconciliation - a world in which the built and the natural exist in delicate, almost spiritual balance.
Together, the artists create a visual conversation rooted in duality - between the mechanical and the organic, presence and absence, the remembered and the reimagined. *Lived Duality* invites viewers to inhabit a liminal space where material and memory coexist, and where form becomes a vessel for reflection on transformation, resilience, and coexistence.
