Femininity Beyond Identity — Contemporary Istanbul 2026: Shiva Zahed Gallery participation in Contemporary Istanbul featuring Maryam Ashkanian, Mahsa Karimizadeh & Fereydoun Ave

Fmeninity Beyond Identity

For the upcoming edition of Contemporary Istanbul, Shiva Zahed Gallery, in its inaugural presentation at the fair, brings together works by Maryam Ashkanian (b. 1988, Bandar-e Anzali), Fereydoun Ave (b. 1945, Tehran), and Mahsa Karimizadeh (b. 1980, Shiraz).
Bringing the practices of these three artists into dialogue, the presentation considers femininity as a language of form, material, and bodily association rather than as a fixed identity. Across textile and sculpture, fabric, foam, blanket fragments, and copper are stitched, pinched, layered, and accumulated into forms that repeatedly evoke the body.

In the works of Ashkanian and Karimizadeh, this bodily vocabulary is more direct. Ashkanian’s sewn forms gather, multiply, and expand around central openings, suggesting flesh, hair, and interior anatomies. Karimizadeh’s pinched surfaces transform foam and copper into taut, skin-like structures shaped by pressure and restraint. In both practices, the body is simultaneously present and withheld, transformed through repetition and abstraction. These gestures resonate with feminist strategies that reclaim the body from its conventional position as an object of representation, allowing it instead to become a source from which form itself is generated. Fereydoun Ave’s textile works introduce a different relationship to femininity. Assembled from blankets and fragments of fabric, they do not directly evoke sexual anatomy. Yet their softness, stitching, layering, and worn surfaces retain associations with the body, intimacy, domesticity, and care. Their quilt-like structures draw on techniques and materials historically associated with women’s labour while resisting conventional expectations of sculptural weight and permanence. Across the presentation, femininity moves beyond biological sex and emerges instead as a field of material and formal possibilities—articulated through softness and pressure, concealment and exposure, interior and exterior, attraction and unease. Rather than assigning a single feminist position to the three artists, the presentation asks how forms, materials, and modes of making culturally associated with the feminine can be inhabited, displaced, and reconstructed from different positions.