Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present ‘I Am the Story' - an online solo exhibition by NYC-based artist Samira Abbassy (b.1965, Ahwaz, Iran), opening virtually on January 6, 2025. The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by curator, writer and broadcaster Dr Sona Datta. Samira Abbassy is a scavenger of untold truths. We once spent an afternoon together in an old American town.

Abbassy’s is a world of interiority. Characters inhabit a psychological space, which beckons by holding up a mirror. Her paintings are populated by female figures, appearing as amalgamations of mothers, daughters and repeating fragments of our own selves. Landscapes are articulated by richly patterned fabrics, butterflies, birds and thick hair that coils around necks or muzzled mouths. Sometimes a loaded gun rises in a shadowy half-light, signaling Beware! Something here needs to be taken note of: Abbassy is calling all the different parts of Samira back to herself. She told me: …It all started with my grandmother’s hair…when I was 12 in Ahwaz one time she showed me under her headscarf. Thin braids of her hair, made all orange by henna, were coiled up around her ears. My grandmother’s hair would become like an umbilicus in my own work, connecting me to her story and the stories of other mothers. I can cut you off but you will keep coming back. So, swallowing a braid is like swallowing the impossible; you can cut my braid but it will reappear and it will always belong. Her grandmother’s interior life became totemic of other unseen stories across her larger practice: her hidden hair, tattoos and a tobacco tin from which she rolled her own cigarettes. Her grandmother showed her things her own mother never could, as she became caught between England and Iran. Abbassy’s paintings are poised with stillness. Like the silent cinema of sleep when, safe in our beds, our unconscious taps at portals usually kept closed as if to say: look, this part of me remains left to be heard. The effect is like a medieval icon shimmering with the patina of past lives. By contrast, Abbassy’s small sculptures are a riotous bric-a-brac of found objects: re-constructed and upturned dolls, heads, legs, with bits bandaged or a set of faceless teeth. In 2019 Accused (left above) screamed along the historic waterways of Venice at the 58th Biennale in an expansive exhibition entitled She Persists, with twenty trailblazing artists from four continents and three generations, including Judy Chicago, Shirin Neshat, The Guerilla Girls and Mithu Sen. Samira Abbassy was born to Arab Iranians in 1965, who left for England when she was two. Living outside London, she felt her otherness keenly and was caught between the strictures of being a Muslim girl at home and something else she was yet to discover as she made her way in the world (...) The PR text is continued on the gallery website.