Group Presentation : Art Basel Miami 2024

Art Basel Miami Beach 2024

Dastan is pleased to announce a trio presentation of works by Maryam Hoseini (b. 1988), Hoda Kashiha (b. 1986), and Roksana Pirouzmand (b. 1990) at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Nova Section, Booth N19. The presentation explores the human body, gender, the burden of time and history, memory, and remembrance, with each artist approaching these concepts through their unique perspectives. 

Roksana Pirouzmand’s work serves as a focal point in the booth, embodying the physicality of the body through clay and ceramic forms. Incorporating elements of earth, water, wind, and fire, her sculpture evokes intergenerational memory, as water drips from a ceramic cast of her grandmother’s body into the next generation, an unfired clay cast of her mother’s body. As the artist states, “Memory is fluid, like a riverbed—it carries sediments of our history, constantly shifting and reshaping." ¹ Maryam Hoseini’s work addresses transformations of the body under societal and internal pressures, with her compositions reflecting on queerness, memory, and imagery. Meanwhile, Hoda Kashiha captures temporal shifts, portraying bodies at different moments within a single frame, crafting layered narratives that traverse time. 

This presentation marks Dastan’s debut at Art Basel’s Miami Beach edition. ​The fair runs from December 6 to December 8, 2024, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Dastan was previously exhibited at the fair’s Hong Kong edition in 2018 and 2024. 

Maryam Hoseini 

Maryam Hoseini’s “Flesh and Sun III” (2024) emerges from one of the artist’s ongoing series, whose flattened nude figures and muted pastel palettes delve into queer histories and seek to look beyond fixed or binary perspectives. Central to this exploration is an embrace of desire, where the pursuit of touch and pleasure becomes an act of liberation against rigid structural and architectural forms. A recurring theme in Hoseini’s work is the extension of elements beyond the confines of the frame, symbolically breaking free from institutional and metaphorical boundaries. “I think my work is partly about strategies of resistance,” says Hoseini. “How can it interrupt cycles of violence and create new possibilities, new offers for forms and figures, bodies and spaces?” ²

Maryam Hoseini delves into the creation of liminal worlds that serve as poignant explorations of gender construction and the inherent violence of power dynamics. Hoseini’s paintings become a gateway to a realm where the boundaries of subjectivity are probed, revealing fragmented architectural environments as the stages for unfolding narratives. 

In discussing their approach to painting, Hoseini explains, “I’m fascinated by ideas of where we belong. My paintings have a groundlessness, a collapse of time and space, where there’s tension between abstraction and representation, shifting perspectives and layers.” This interplay of abstraction and representation, public and private, allows Hoseini to create works where figures, untethered from rigid definitions, embody a defiant stance against societal norms and opening possibilities for reimagined histories and identities. 

Hoda Kashiha 

In Hoda Kashiha’s work, materiality is reimagined on the canvas, where forms and subjects become boundaries that momentarily suspend time and space to hold multiple narratives at once. Her exploration of the relationship between the vase and the female body began when she first encountered the pottery wheel—a dynamic interaction she describes as “a dance between me and clay that made us one.” This interest deepened through her study of Indian miniature paintings, where depictions of female figures are surrounded by pots and vases. For Kashiha, vessels represent a convergence of containment, spilling, and nourishment, symbolic qualities that resonate across the jar, vase, nature, and the female form. Her paintings aim to evoke these shared senses, blending traditional and intimate themes within a contemporary framework.

Roksana Pirouzmand 

In her own words, Roksana Pirouzmand’s practice “delineates our family history without betraying its secrets.”³ The sculptural installation, “The Past Seeps through the Present” (2022), features a ceramic cast of her grandmother’s body, suspended above an unfired clay cast of her mother’s figure, which lies recumbent on a couch. Drops of water fall slowly from the grandmother’s body onto the mother’s, gradually eroding the unfired clay and dissolving it into the couch. This relentless yet delicate process transforms the installation into a temporal experience, transcending its static image. Like a music track played only once, it unfolds in time, with the erosion marking an irreversible journey. Through this fleeting yet profound transformation, the artist meditates on themes of memory, lineage, and the impermanence of familial ties. 

Working with the material clay is deeply rooted in the physicality of creation: the artist’s hands molded these forms, and the clay bears the imprint of her touch, grounding the work in an intimate bodily connection, though the work does not result from a playful process of freely shaping clay, and the figures were carefully replicated out of molds. Pirouzmand explores the materiality of memory—how the body holds and releases histories and how touch becomes a way of knowing. 

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1.         Pirouzmand, Roksana. (2023). “Memory is a Riverbed: A Conversation with Roksana Pirouzmand.” Elephant Magazine. https://elephant.art/memory-is-a-riverbed-a-conversation-with-roksana-pirouzmand/

2.        Hoseini, Maryam. “Maryam Hoseini: Painting as Resistance.” Art Basel, www.artbasel.com/stories/maryam-hoseini-painting-resistance-iran-new-york.

3.      Murmurs LA, "The Past Seeps into the Present", Press Release for Roksana Pirouzmand's solo exhibition. 2022