The Living River, the first UK solo exhibition by Bordeaux-based Iranian artist Armineh Negahdari affirms her persistent commitment to drawing as a practice, while suspending the viewer between presence and disappearance. The exhibition is driven by the artist’s sense of urgency in the face of moments; actions or memories being lost.
Negahdari’s practice unfolds without prior planning, immersed in an intense flow where line is guided by intuition. Drawing runs as a continuous thread – across oil, graphite, and charcoal – to reflect a sustained commitment to the legitimacy of her thoughts and actions. Equally rapid are her marks that push against the limits of the sparse mediums she employs, where traces give form to thought as it unfolds.
Embedded within the fabric of daily life, her practice has become ritual, where repetition moves between tension and collapse. Compelled by necessity and sustained through continual renewal, each gesture returns to the self and to the body that has become the epicentre of a world in constant motion. Fragmented, and rarely unscathed, bodies become an act of movement; too vital to be contained within a fixed or stable form. Figures float, spin, and drift through space, never fully anchored, slipping between human, botanical, and animal condition. A flower head becomes a face; limbs merge with the terrain; these mutable bodies resist narrative closure, inviting sustained attention to processes of change.
When Negahdari’s drawing extends beyond paper, it briefly inhabits the materials of everyday life: bedsheets, fabric scraps, wrapping paper, and cardboard packaging are co-opted as surfaces, carrying the quiet residues of her routine. Appearing to spill into provisional space, these materials retain their own histories and resistances. On these textured, unstable grounds, grainy smudges of graphite and oil disperse a portrayal of figures, anchored within makeshift and fragile landscape.
As poetry evokes meaning without fixing it by moving through rhythm and form, her works similarly unfold in resistance to rigid logic, becoming sites where singular presence insists rather than resolves. Poetry persists as a condition within Negahdari’s practice from where the artist takes the title for the exhibition. For the poet, Shams Langeroodi, the living river does not represent, but enacts: a rise and recession, a pulse, a continuous deferral that folds inevitability into movement. Water circulates here not only as image but as method. Its flow and recurrence, both stated and displaced operate as material and metaphor, though they are never fully contained.
For Armineh Negahdari, nature and landscape are not subjects but conditions; fields through which perception, memory, and movement unfold. The recurring metaphor of the river threads through this exhibition: not as image, but as orientation and continual passage, shaped by personal experience and by wider forces that press and pull at the edges of life; A state of continual passage; Of moving forward without settling into fixed form. In this, her work resists closure. It remains in motion; open, unfolding; where meaning, like water, is carried, shaped, and never fully held.
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