Inside the Booths, Beyond the Walls

Hassan Saradipour, SARAI Gallery - Tehran
Contemporary Middle Eastern art finds its global stage through SARAI Gallery, where its booth became a site of dialogue rather than mere display. The gallery fosters encounters that ripple between artists and audiences, across borders and disciplines, revealing the nuances of practice through perspective. Hassan Saradipour sees art as storytelling. He finds the idea that artists must "disrupt society entirely" absurdly overblown, a pressure that often crushes the very voice one hopes to cultivate. What draws him are the artists who inhabit their own worlds and translate them into precise, quietly powerful visual narratives.

At Abu Dhabi Art 2025, the gallery presented four artists - Hossein Mohammadi, Abbas Nasle Shamloo, Moslem Khezri, and Mehdi Chitsazha. "What connects them is a shared commitment to narrating lived experience - life as it is actually observed, remembered, and endured. None of them relies on grand, declarative themes as a shortcut. Instead, they picture the everyday reality that is shaped by larger forces, without turning the work into a headline", Saradipour explains.

The booth's layout and lighting were considered to allow the works to breathe individually while forming a coherent atmosphere collectively. Installation was guided by intuition: which piece arrests the eye first, where a viewer pauses, and what lingers as they leave. Light, height, and spacing are tuned so subtly that the artist's intentions emerge naturally, guiding your eye without forcing it. One senses a rhythm - the moments where attention stops, where it drifts, where it stays - and in that orchestration, each piece speaks for itself while contributing to a larger, unspoken conversation.

When it comes to the artworks, Khezri returns to the world of school, tracing memory and discipline, unease and humour, the subtle social undercurrents that stay long after the classroom has emptied. A distinguished figurative artist, Moslem Khezri often explores the interaction between the human body and space, aiming to manifest the inner truth hidden in the daily moments of Iranian life. His works encapsulate multifaceted sentiments of impassioned, intense tenderness, yet disclose sadness and sorrow. Ultimately, they transcend space and time, manifesting a visual playground for figures to interact and transform their environments.

Khezri and Chitsazha, two distinct voices in contemporary Iranian figurative art, navigate the interplay between human presence and the environments it inhabits. Khezri's practice meditates on memory, discipline, and the nuanced currents of humour and unease that linger long after the classroom empties, seeking to render the intimate truths embedded in quotidian life with a tenderness that is at once impassioned. Chitsazha, whose early love of literature and cinema was awakened to painting through a formative encounter with a teacher, captures the urban and social landscapes of Iran through the eyes of childhood. His works trace children and stray dogs moving through sunlit alleys and winding streets, revealing the world's chaotic beauty with an innocent gaze. Early experiments - painting on newspapers and cotton sacks during military service - prefigured his ability to transform lived experience into visual stories, a sensibility that carries through his films, writings, and paintings exploring modernity, urban life, and artistic identity.

For Saradipour, Abu Dhabi carries resonance beyond logistics or geography. Situated close to southern Iran, the city evokes a sense of return, stirring memories of opening SARAI in Mahshahr - a small, remote city where risk, belief, and ambition shaped the gallery's beginnings. At home in California, he lives among his collection, as one might in a private museum, constantly re-curating, attuned to the way light, space, and time breathe life into the work.