Shiva Ahmadi: Crown of Flames
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Haines Gallery proudly presents Crown of Flames, our second solo exhibition with Iranian-American multimedia artist Shiva Ahmadi (b. 1975, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area). Conceived before the current Middle Eastern conflict, Crown of Flames features new and recent works that continue Ahmadi's longterm exploration of conflict, corruption, and instability, informed by her own experiences and the current news cycle. The works on view unfold as both personal testimony and global allegory, at once dazzling and devastating. Across painting, sculpture, and video, Ahmadi fuses formal beauty with an undercurrent of violence, drawing uneasy parallels between her brightly painted scenes and global issues of war, resource extraction, and the rise of authoritarian regimes - in the United States, Iran, Venezuela, and beyond.
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Ahmadi’s newest watercolor paintings are centered upon female figures, a marked departure from the often faceless, genderless beings and animals that dominate her other works. The series began during the COVID-19 pandemic as explorations of bodily anxiety and trauma, and took on new significance after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22 year-old Iranian woman who died in custody after being detained by the Morality Police for her “improper” hijab, and subsequent movement across Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Ahmadi’s women are defiant, nurturing forces, powerful in spite of the spectre of the physical and psychic trauma that loom over the works. Set against luminous washes of color, they bear wings or wrestle serpents and leopards, their limbs and hair entwined with plant life, invoking mythological, religious, and primordial associations.
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“The female body — and hair in particular—has become a central site of resistance, vulnerability, and power in my work.”
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A pair of elaborated decorated sculptures explore the entanglement of oil, capital, and bloodshed. In Oil Barrel #32 (2026), a repurposed steel drum is embellished with paint and Swarovski crystals. Amid intricate patterns and fantastical creatures, the barrel is torn, punctured, and bloodied with red paint, viscerally invoking the true price of this precious commodity. This newly created work is exhibited alongside Pressure Cooker #2 (2016). Here, the metallic surfaces of an aluminum pressure cooker has been inscribed with delicate intaglio etchings, its bellies filled with nails and wire, making reference to real-world tools of violence, and more generally to the domesticity of terror. Across both bodies of work, the artist transforms and reclaims politically charged objects through ornamentation, asserting beauty, care, and agency in the face of violence and extraction.
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Crown of Flames debuts Ahmadi’s new video work of the same title, a two-channel animation comprising hundreds of individual, hand-painted watercolors that she transforms into vivid, moving images that pulse with life. The story unfolds across two parallel worlds: a lush jungle inhabited by playful monkeys on one screen, and a desert oil field and its looming, pumping machinery on the other. Temptation arises as fireflies swarm the forest, only to become flaming missiles as the monkeys swat and swipe at them. By the end of the five-minute work, the monkeys have abandoned their burning home for another, their greed and follies serving as a mirror of our own. Drawing from diverse storytelling traditions ranging from Persian miniature painting to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Ahmadi crafts a contemporary parable about land grabs and resource wars, and the consequences for individuals and the environment.
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A suite of limited edition prints, produced by Magnolia Editions, accompanies the animation. In contrasting scenes of early idyll and extraction, Ahmadi applies further details with watercolor and pastels, adding depth, texture, and movement to each edition variée.Taken together, the works on view in Crown of Flames offer a fable of our times. As Ahmadi reminds us, “For me it really doesn’t matter where you live — whether it is Iran, Syria, or Detroit. My work deals with abuse of power and corruption.” In a period shaped by increasing polarization and instability, the exhibition urgently suggests the necessity of seeing clearly — and refusing to look away.
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