DREAMING IN FARSI
– SOLO EXHIBTION BY YASAMIN KHADEMBASHI –
16 – 31 January 2026 at PS Art Studio
Dreaming in Farsi is the debut solo exhibition by Iranian-Australian artist Yasamin Khadembashi, developed as part of the 2025 Studio 7 Residency Program at PS Art Space. The exhibition presented a new body of work alongside older pieces, that expands the language of painting through sculptural, tactile, and materially complex approaches, situating Khadembashi’s practice at the intersection of painting, installation, and object-making.
Working across piped oil paint and multi-material processes, Khadembashi constructs densely layered surfaces embedded with rhinestones, synthetic hair, mirrors, and metal leaf. These works draw on visual and material references from SWANA cultures, recontextualising adornment, ritual, and domestic labour within a contemporary framework. Through this approach, painting becomes an embodied and spatial practice—one that holds tension between excess and control, ornamentation and rupture. Grounded in diasporic experience, the exhibition engages with themes of migration, displacement, bodily autonomy, and the politics of representation. The works resist fixed narratives, instead offering fragmented, non-linear forms that reflect the instability and multiplicity of identity. Surfaces are built through repetition and accumulation, operating as sites where memory, grief, and resistance are both concealed and made visible.
Dreaming in Farsi was supported by the City of Fremantle Arts Grant, enabling the realisation of the exhibition alongside a public program and community engagement. To open the exhibition, guests were welcomed onto Country by Noongar Elder and advocate Aunty Liz Hayden, alongside Ngaanyatjarra Cultural Educator Daisy Tjuparntarri Ward.
A public artist panel discussion followed later in the program, facilitated by Minali Gamage and bringing together Khadembashi, Zali Morgan, Natalie de Rozario, and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah. The discussion explored the positioning of their practices as BIPOC artists within contemporary Australia, engaging with questions of migration, displacement, language, materiality, and ethics.
During the exhibition, a work was acquired by the Murdoch University Art Collection, marking Khadembashi's first institutional acquisition.
As both a culmination of an intensive period of research and production, and a foundation for future work, Dreaming in Farsi asserts Khadembashi’s commitment to expanding the possibilities of painting while creating space for diasporic narratives to be held, materialised, and immortlised.
Photography for Dreaming in Farsi is by Adam Kenna.
DREAMING IN FARSI:
ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION
Minali Gamage (facilitator) in conversation with Yasamin Khadembashi, Zali Morgan, Abdul-Rahman Adullah and Natalie de Rozario.
Photography for the artist panel is by Adam Kenna.
I acknowledge that I am a settler who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.