Silent Currents

SARAHCROWN is pleased to announce Silent Currents, a two-person exhibition that brings together works by Anahita Bagheri (b. 1995, Iran) and Stefano Caimi (b. 1991, Italy), two artists whose practices engage with plant life and nature as a lens through which to examine ecological urgency, cultural memory, and deeply human narratives beneath their quiet surfaces.

Anahita Bagheri’s work explores the social, cultural, and political symbolism of flowers, drawing from their historical presence in Islamic art and Persian mythology particularly the ornamental floral motifs known as Eslimi and Khataei, in which flowers are connected by flowing, curving stems. Rather than treating flowers as decorative or purely natural forms, she reclaims them as charged symbols shaped by history, power, and resistance. Her practice is grounded in a critical engagement with tradition and its contemporary implications.

Working primarily with papier-mâché—a material historically used in lacquered artifacts across the SWANA region—Bagheri pushes the medium beyond its original function and context. She subverts this craft tradition, which she associates with the patriarchal structures she grew up within, to create sculptures that confront the oppressive states and policies she has experienced. By reversing two-dimensional floral arabesque motifs into three-dimensional forms, she creates sharp, bodily sculptures whose edges signal agency and defiance. These works challenge conventional associations of flowers with femininity, delicacy, or ornament, transforming them instead into active symbols of resistance through the tension between beauty and violence, history and the present.

Stefano Caimi presents works from his Arborescent and Lichenescent series, which focus on trees and forests and how their symbiotic organisms are adapting and reshaping entire ecosystems. Rather than depicting forests as stable or idyllic, Caimi emphasizes their beauty in being resilient eco systems in constant change. 

His process combines controlled techniques with more intuitive gestures. Photographic images are transferred onto the canvas using a CNC laser machine developed by the artist and pyrography. The linen surfaces are thus burned and charred, creating darkened grounds that suggest scorched trees, foliage, and fallen trunks. Oil pastel painting follows, with carefully chosen colors—often drawn from moments of sunrise, dusk, and living organisms—used to structure space and light. Through this layered approach, Caimi reinterprets landscape not as direct representation, but as a way to better understand cycles of growth, destruction, and renewal in contemporary forests.

Together, Caimi and Bagheri create a dialogue between ecology and culture, science and symbolism. Silent Currents invites viewers to look closely at what grows quietly around us and to consider the layered meanings embedded in seemingly familiar forms. Beneath their stillness, these works speak to continuity, survival, and the subtle forces shaping our relationship to the natural world.