Group Presentation | Art Basel Miami Beach 2025: Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

Dastan is pleased to announce its participation at Art Basel Miami Beach with a presentation of works curated by Donna Honarpisheh as part of her ongoing project, Maximal Miniatures, whose latest exhibition was recently featured at Middle East Institute, Washington DC. This is Dastan’s second presentation at the Miami Beach edition of Art Basel. The fair will be held from December 5 to 7, 2025 at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

 

The presentation and its extended viewing room include works by Ali Akbar Sadeghi (b. 1937), Farah Ossouli (b. 1953), Reza Aramesh (b. 1970), Bahar Behbahani (b. 1973), Andisheh Avini (b. 1974), Iman Raad (b. 1979), Shahryar Hatami (b. 1980), Mamali Shafahi (b. 1982), Arghavan Khosravi (b. 1984), Maryam Ayeen & Abbas Shahsavar (b. 1985; b. 1983), and Hadi Alijani (b. 1987).

 

The booth brings together these works around a shared premise: how much ‘world’ can be contained within an image. Taking the notion of Maximal Miniatures as its point of departure, the project approaches Persian Miniature (Negârgari) not as a fixed style but as a method for organizing density and layered narrative on a single surface.

 

Historically, the Persian miniature is characterized by a critical kinship between text and image. Most profoundly, the miniature is formed by a strong history of the poetic verse, mythology, epic narrative, and lyricism, establishing the link between poetics and the visual in Iranian art history. Maximal Miniatures extends this logic beyond the manuscript page into painting, sculpture, relief, installation, moving image, and other contemporary forms.

 

Maximal Miniatures is interested in the ways in which contemporary artists have built upon this maximalist impulse within the miniature and reinvented the genre with new questions in mind. The descriptor “maximal” points to the way in which each of the artists builds from the sense of space, ornamentation, perspective, and poetry within and beyond the image to expand them in scale, color, subject, symbol, and form.

 

Works by Farah Ossouli and Arghavan Khosravi articulate a direct engagement with Miniature Painting, while transforming its compositional and narrative contents with contemporary reflections on gender. Ossouli mobilizes gouache, ornamental fields, and controlled figuration to address questions of gender, violence, and art history, placing women’s experiences at the center of the image. Khosravi experiments with scale and three-dimensional canvases, building her own shaped wooden panels, which add further depth and create optical illusions that augment the compositions.

 

The collaborative practice of Maryam Ayeen & Abbas Shahsavar relocates Miniature’s intimacy to scenes of domestic life. Working on scenes of everyday life, they depict couples, families, and interiors with layered paint; gesture, décor, and posture become indicators of social position and unease. Questions of myth and conflict enter through the practices of Reza Aramesh and Aliakbar Sadeghi, who fold narratives from past and present into dense images of power, heroism, and vulnerability.

 

The work of Shahryar Hatami is often based on long-term research into manuscript traditions, mathematical systems, and spatial storytelling, translating these findings into contemporary visual languages. His work is not only technically rigorous but conceptually layered, making it distinctly museum-quality in execution. In the piece presented at the fair, he reimagines an episode from Ferdowsi’s epic Shahnameh, the tragic tale of Bahram and Azadeh.

 

Another strand of the presentation considers Miniature through language of images, ornament, and landscape. Hadi Alijani’s compositions assemble symbolic objects and natural forms into still lifes and vistas that oscillate between diagram and dream. Iman Raad mobilizes miniature painting, folk arts, and digital imagery to produce fields of hybrid figures and typographic motifs. Andisheh Avini integrates craft-derived patterns into controlled structures, while in Bahar Behbahani’s practice layered maps and botanical references treat the Persian Garden and water systems as both visual model and political framework.

 

Across these approaches, Maximal Miniatures becomes less of a cohesive artistic genre than it is a shared impulse toward images and their capacity to bear both a poetics and a historical unfolding. Moving between intimate moments and broader collective experiences, the exhibition invites the viewer to shift between close reading and broader socio-cultural reflection, proposing that even the smallest image can open onto expansive worlds.

 

In addition to the works showcased in the booth, the gallery has created an online viewing room to augment its presentation with a selection of works by artists whose practice and approach can be read within the scope of Maximal Miniatures. The online viewing room includes works by  by Ali Akbar Sadeghi (b. 1937), Farah Ossouli (b. 1953), Reza Aramesh (b. 1970), Bahar Behbahani (b. 1973), Andisheh Avini (b. 1974), Iman Raad (b. 1979), Shahryar Hatami (b. 1980), Mamali Shafahi (b. 1982), Arghavan Khosravi

(b. 1984), Maryam Ayeen & Abbas Shahsavar (b. 1985; b. 1983), and Hadi Alijani (b. 1987). and can be accessed through the following link:

 https://dastan.gallery/viewing-room/55/?_preview_uid=fb13c6e6695d462181e41458430c1480&version=d3438c 

 

* Donna Honarpisheh is Associate Curator of Knight Art and Research at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, where she curates global exhibitions in modern and contemporary art. She is the writer and host of ICA Miami’s award-winning podcast, Tomorrow is the Problem, which covers pressing issues in art and culture. In addition to her curatorial work, Honarpisheh is a scholar of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory and has taught undergraduate courses in Global Modernisms, postcolonial studies, and aesthetics at Fordham University, Sarah Lawrence College, UC Berkeley, and Georgetown University.