Against Transparency: Ahmad Rafi

Shiva Zahed Gallery is proud to announce Against Transparency, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Ahmad Rafi (b. 1961, Tehran). The exhibition presents a pivotal body of work produced over the past two decades, re-evaluated here for its profound relevance to contemporary global discourses on visibility, representation, and the limits of the image.

Rafi’s work challenges the classical mandate that painting must provide a clear window onto a visible world. Instead, his canvases — populated by veils, curtains, and obscured figures — function through opacity. By disrupting the viewer’s expectation of direct access, Rafi frames the act of seeing as a condition held in suspension.

 “Presenting this work today is a matter of critical urgency,” says the gallery director. “At a moment when visibility is often equated with exposure and data access, Rafi’s paintings insist on the fundamental right to remain unknown. These works do not resolve visibility; they suspend it.” 

By placing Rafi’s aesthetic of obstruction in dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s “Right to Opacity,” the exhibition highlights the gallery’s commitment to intellectual inquiry and cross-cultural theoretical exchange. Against Transparency positions the artist as a prescient figure who anticipated contemporary anxieties surrounding surveillance and the commodification of the gaze.