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Hawthorn Contemporary is pleased to announce the exhibition opening of Dancing on Myth’s Stage, exhibition featuring paintings and drawings of Zuhal Feraidon and Aparna Sarkar.

The works in the exhibition are inspired by Indo-Persian art history and cultural iconography, an influence based on each artist's personal heritage. Zuhal Feraidon was born in Afghanistan and immigrated to the US as a refugee of war in 2005; Aparna Sarkar is first-generation Indian-American. Their inherited histories are recorded through painting and drawing; they explore different facets of intersectional, evolving, and ever-growing identity through creative representation. The exhibition title comes from artist Chitra Ganesh's entry for "Myth" in Shifter Magazine’s 2016 Dictionary of the Possible, a project that reflects the questions and musings from a year of discussion amongst artists, writers, philosophers, activists, and others at the New School in New York.

In the paintings, figures swim within luminous swaths of color, fighting against the current of gradients, navigating contemporary conflicts with finesse and resilience. Mythic figures scaffold both artists’ works–characters are often in-motion and exuberant, with a dancer’s strength. They are calls to action, projections of the artists’ selves and their kin. Feraidon makes paintings in solidarity with women in Afghanistan, depicting Afghan women in resilience and power. Sarkar is interested in the shapeshifting body: she plays with gender and queer desire in her iconic forms and allows color and mark to sometimes take over until the abstracted structure of a painting obliterates its legible figuration. There’s an honoring of the elements in both artists’ paintings: the ancient currents of earth, fire, air, and water run deep. Transparencies can describe the permeability of the barrier between past and present, the diaphanous traces of ancestry that remain in the new ways we live and think.