Iranian Nowruz celebrations begin with Chaharshanbe Suri, a ritual of purification, which involves jumping over flames and reciting in Farsi words meaning “May your redness be mine, and my pallor be yours.” Fire is a device for transformation. It cures ailments and gives new life.
For her exhibition “Strange Fruit,” Dorsa Asadi joined the transformative power of fire with a narrative structure derived from Dante. Small glossily glazed ceramic sculptures resting on raised tables arranged in clusters across the room took the form of plants, bodies of water, flames, and human figures that together laid out a journey of ascension via a path of destruction. Taking a page from the Divine Comedy, Asadi divided the exhibition into three parts: “Inferno,” “Purgatory,” and “Paradiso.”
The colorful style of the works, as well as the character names indicated in the titles, turn Dante’s epic into a gruesome Grimm’s fairy tale with a Disney makeover. The first piece was “A sinner’s flesh should have an Immersion baptism,” Belle said, 2022. The miniature scene depicts a variety of flora and what might be a glint of flames surrounding an elevated body of turquoise water. Occupying the shallow pool are two figures with chalky-white skin, wearing pale-yellow dresses. One has long red hair while the other’s is cool blue, recalling the colors you’d see in a fire. Their hands are bloody. They stand over a third, unclothed body, pink and featureless. The redhead seems to be digging her fingers into the naked figure’s face. In Elle leading the sinnerman through the Inferno, 2022, a naked body appears hunched over on all fours, flames bursting out of his back. The blue-haired figure stands overhead with her legs between those of the naked body, positioned like an instructor directing the blazing body into annihilation.
Asadi made references to Nina Simone’s songs throughout the exhibition, starting with its title, taken from the protest song made famous by Billie Holiday but also recorded by Simone. Some of the individual works’ titles, too, evoke Simone’s songs, as does the very name of Sinnerman, taken from one of her most famous recordings. In “Purgatory,” where Asadi’s palette has been toned down to create an overall feeling of anguish and decay, Fructifying Chenar (plane tree) with the strange fruit at the wrong time of Autumn, 2023, shows the now-defeated Sinnerman’s torn-apart limbs hanging from and being absorbed into a tree.
In “Paradiso,” Sinnerman is reborn as Sugarman. In The Ascension of the Sugarman, 2023, the figure steps out, fully intact again, from a flower with a light-green stem and a large tonguelike petal. And that wasn’t the only pink featureless naked body featured in this section. Take me to the river, 2023, shows a line of them, their legs dragging the water they stand in, their hands clutching each other’s hips and shoulders as if in a rhythmic procession. Although none have faces, one can imagine them smiling, joyous. The blue- and red-haired characters are also here. In Elle and Belle bathing in the pools of Paradiso, 2023, they hold each other in waist-deep water, in a setting that looks very similar to what was portrayed in the opening piece of the exhibition.
In Asadi’s work, materials go hand in hand with narrative: The soft and wet mineral clay forms have been transformed by fire, emerging from the flames as vivid characters. Their appearance always maintains an organic feel. The looseness of the glaze recalls the earthy origins of clay and complements the natural elements that are active components in Asadi’s compositions.
— Yalda Bidshahri