Yousha Bashir & Rana Dehghan: Dastan:Outside [Focus Room 03]

Dastan:Outside presents the third edition of Focus Room near Dastan's Basement on West Maryam Street, corner of Raz
Alley. "Focus Room 03" featuring works by Rana Dehghan and Yousha Bashir, opens on Friday, July 17, and will remain on
view through August 7, 2026. This duo presentation was previously showcased, with a slight variation, at Liste Art Fair 2023 in Basel.
The works of Yousha Bashir and Rana Dehghan examine the relationship between the self and its surroundings through two distinct visual languages. While Bashir constructs layered digital-inspired landscapes, Dehghan's fiberglass sculptures give physical form to elusive figures. Together, their works consider ideas of materiality, the boundary between the virtual and the real, the visible and the hidden, and the shifting relationship between body, mind, and environment.
Rana Dehghan's fiberglass sculptures draw on the familiar image of a ghost, a floating white sheet with simple circular eyes, but transform it into something both playful and unsettling. The figure also reflects her artistic process: by covering an invisible presence, it unexpectedly becomes visible. Working across painting, sculpture, video, animation, and installation, Dehghan often combines materials and ideas to create works that move between imagination, memory, and lived experience.
Through these sculptures, the intangible takes on a physical presence. Her ghost-like figures become stand-ins for emotional and psychological states, occupying a space between absence and presence. At times they suggest isolation, while at others they offer comfort or protection, embodying different aspects of the self as it moves through uncertainty.
In contrast, Yousha Bashir approaches image-making through a carefully structured process. Beginning with digital sketches, he gradually builds fragmented forms into expansive, imagined landscapes. His compositions balance order and movement, combining geometric shapes with pixelated textures and flowing lines that blur the distinction between digital and physical space. Moving between abstraction and representation, Bashir's paintings explore how inner experiences and external environments continually shape one another.