Liste Art Fair 2023: Yousha Bashir & Rana Dehghan

The traditional portrayal of ghosts as a floating draped white sheet with cartoonish circles for eyes in Rana Dehghan's fiberglasses refers to her artistic process. Ironically when the ghost's intangible and virtual entity is covered, it gets revealed. With a career spanning several media and approaches, from painting to sculpture, video, animation, and installation, Rana often playfully mixes materials and concepts into fantasies, fleeting sensations, or fierce encounters. 

Through the use of objects, Dehghan makes the intangible tangible, much like the imagery of a ghost, with a clever play of irony and concealment. Rana Dehghan’s sculptures reflect a ‘self’ finding itself in an irreconcilable state. She summons what appear to be ghosts or spirits. At times the artist wants to get away from them and, at other times, use them to build a sanctuary for others. As such, they can be thought of as giving objective reality to different manifestations of the soul. 

Contrary to Dehghan, who tries to mold human emotions into objects, the artistic process for Yousha Bashir is meticulously systematized, engineered, and leveled. His images are more or less musically composed as he pieces together elements within a system. He begins by sketching out digital images, completes multiple fragmented peaks, and ends up with a futuristic landscape. Forms thread the line between virtual and physical means of being. Geometric shapes in his acrylic on canvas paintings indicate a distinct, objective presence, but what surrounds them —pixelated or curved lines— bring fluidity to the surface. The play of abstraction and depiction in the works of Bashir hints at the self’s precarious relationship with inner and outer landscapes.