Kolsoum Salehi | "Folded In": Dastan's Basement

Dastan's Basement is happy to announce the opening of "Folded In", Kolsum Salehi's solo painting exhibition, starting Friday, August 8, 2025. The show will be on view through Friday, August 29. This is the artist's 2nd solo exhibition at Dastan's Basement following "The Library of Babel" (2021). Works of Salehi have appeared in several group shows held by Dastan.

To Kolsum Salehi, "Folded In" speaks in a visual language more akin to a "whisper". It is the language of "collective silence, of those who have been forgotten." The human portraits and trees drawn with pencil and monotype using papier-mâché are thus shadows of what they represent and they point to an absence. They reveal residues of a body, a memory, a connection. The boundary separating the human body and the world of nature is no longer visible. The dark, scratched surfaces, blots, shadows, and half completed forms are remains of an unconsumated narrative. Every scratch is like a trace of time, a layer on the body of the image.

Kolsum Salehi (b. 1988, Zanjan, Iran) developed her career as a painter and sculptor. She held her first solo exhibition, “The Waste Land", in 2015 (O Gallery, Tehran) and her last with Dastan's Basement ("Library of Babel”, 2021). "The Library of Babel" was conceived over a two-year period during the Corona crisis. Her group exhibitions include , including "Agog" (Datan:Outside Project, Tehran, 2017); "The Weight of Time" (Dastan:Outside Project, Tehran 2018); "Encircle the Apple or Shadowlessness" (Dastan:Outside Project, Tehran, 2019); "Arches of Agony" (Guest House , Los Angeles, 2023); "Landscapes of the Mind" (+2 Gallery, Tehran, 2024); "Dead Body" (8Cube, Tehran, 2025). Dastan represented her at Art Dubai 2023. She received the Vista Prize in 2019