Haniko Zahra
Almost Sunset, 2025
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 61 cm
30 x 24 in
30 x 24 in
Most of Haniko's paintings begin with something from her life in Los Angeles, a street at sunset, a parked car, a storefront window, a body in motion, a small moment...
Most of Haniko's paintings begin with something from her life in Los Angeles, a street at sunset, a parked car, a storefront window, a body in motion, a small moment that catches her. That moment becomes the core. She brings it into the studio not to document it, but to interfere with it.
Haniko lived in Iran for most of her life, and that history shapes how she sees and imagines. When she begins painting, memories, restrictions, emotional tensions, and long-term experiences from that life merge with the American image. She layers them together. She distorts them. The painting moves away from realism, but it never fully leaves it. It still carries a trace of something real, pressured, altered, destabilized.
The body is present in her work, but not as a simple representation. It appears as compression, exposure, vulnerability, force. Visceral forms repeat across the canvases, sometimes sensual, sometimes confrontational. They are not planned symbols. They emerge through repetition and gesture. Over time, she has come to understand that they carry questions about power, control, desire, fragility, and endurance. They hold tension rather than resolve it.
For Haniko, gender comes after agency. Before asking who a body is, she asks: who controls the space? Who is visible? Who absorbs pressure? Gender enters the work, but it is secondary to the structure of power operating within the image.
She paints quickly. If she overworks a painting, it loses its emotional charge. Hesitation produces politeness. She wants the paintings to function like a small obstruction, subtle but persistent, something that makes the viewer slightly aware of their own body again.
Haniko is not interested in decorative beauty. She wants the work to feel like a push-pin inside a shoe, small but impossible to ignore. Slightly uncomfortable. A quiet disruption.
The paintings are not narratives about Iran or USA. They are about what happens to perception after living within different systems of control and freedom, about what remains inside a body. After struggle, vision sharpens. The work holds that sharpened gaze: alert, unsettled, persistent.
Haniko lived in Iran for most of her life, and that history shapes how she sees and imagines. When she begins painting, memories, restrictions, emotional tensions, and long-term experiences from that life merge with the American image. She layers them together. She distorts them. The painting moves away from realism, but it never fully leaves it. It still carries a trace of something real, pressured, altered, destabilized.
The body is present in her work, but not as a simple representation. It appears as compression, exposure, vulnerability, force. Visceral forms repeat across the canvases, sometimes sensual, sometimes confrontational. They are not planned symbols. They emerge through repetition and gesture. Over time, she has come to understand that they carry questions about power, control, desire, fragility, and endurance. They hold tension rather than resolve it.
For Haniko, gender comes after agency. Before asking who a body is, she asks: who controls the space? Who is visible? Who absorbs pressure? Gender enters the work, but it is secondary to the structure of power operating within the image.
She paints quickly. If she overworks a painting, it loses its emotional charge. Hesitation produces politeness. She wants the paintings to function like a small obstruction, subtle but persistent, something that makes the viewer slightly aware of their own body again.
Haniko is not interested in decorative beauty. She wants the work to feel like a push-pin inside a shoe, small but impossible to ignore. Slightly uncomfortable. A quiet disruption.
The paintings are not narratives about Iran or USA. They are about what happens to perception after living within different systems of control and freedom, about what remains inside a body. After struggle, vision sharpens. The work holds that sharpened gaze: alert, unsettled, persistent.