Nargess Hashemi | "A Waking Dream": +2 [Deh-Vanak]

+2 presents “A Waking Dream,” a solo exhibition of works by Nargess Hashemi. The exhibition opens on Friday, October 31, 2025, and will run until Friday, November 21. This marks Hashemi’s debut solo exhibition at Dastan. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including fifteen solo exhibitions in Iran, the UAE, and France since the early 2000s. “A Waking Dream” consists of “Dreams”, a series of drawings in dialogue with a crochet installation from the ”The House Breathes” series. 

She studied Painting at the Tehran University of Art and continued her studies in ancient Iranian languages at the Neyshabur Foundation.. She began her artistic journey in the late 1990s and continues her practice across several mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. She has not confined herself to one format, and each story is told in its own specific way, constantly changing and evolving. 

In “Dreams”, she observes her family members. The series consists of drawings of sleeping figures, family members, caught in their afternoon nap or night sleep suspended between layers of blankets, pillows, and sheets, outlined with pen. While the figures are drawn using the simplest lines, the delicate waves, patterns and forms of fabrics, textiles and clothes have been meticulously sketched, vivified and animated. The works are detailed to the point that the napping of the wool and velvet blankets is depicted through hundreds of small pen strokes. 

The sleeping figures drawn on tracing paper are then stapled onto domestic materials: wrapping paper, dining cloth, fabric, or threads. These backgrounds, resembling the margins of a Persian miniature, often resonate with the drawn characters: a sleeping child on top of car patterned wrapping paper. These materials have been carefully sourced and selected so that they depict a sense of solace or relief in the sleeping figures and their aura. 

The installations made in collaboration with her sisters, Akram and Azam Hashemi, use a combination of recycled material, yarn and thread using crochet techniques. In the latest editions of these installations, presented in this exhibition, yarn and recycled plastic have been woven together. In their newest forms, the threads and fabrics reappear, hung from above, transforming the gallery into a dream-like, shifting environment. Depending on the viewer’s position, the works alter in form, recalling the way dreams mutate when recalled upon waking. 

Her crochet curtains act like delicate walls that divide spaces, providing shelter and privacy, encouraging togetherness, and fostering interaction between viewer and work without completely concealing either. 

Hashemi’s practice can be seen as a dialogue with architecture: she redefines space not by constructing walls or interiors but through the delicate layering of crochet. This woven architectural space and its shadows invite viewers to contemplate the boundaries between themselves and their reflections, between reality and representation.