I Bloom Where You Hold Me

Gallery Isabelle opens its autumn season with I Bloom Where You Hold Me, a two-artist exhibition of collaborative works by Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian, on view at Alserkal Avenue from 23 September to 4 November 2026. Drawn from the pair's ongoing Flower series, the drawings unfold across gallery walls covered with hand-drawn graffiti.

Begun in 2022, when growing and tending plants became part of the artists' daily life, the series considers what it means to care for, sustain and grow alongside one another. "Bodies hold onto one another within unruly fields of flowers, forming constellations of intimacy," the gallery writes, yet togetherness is not constant: figures also slump, withdraw or appear exhausted by the worlds they inhabit. Flowers here do not offer an escape from difficult realities; they grow with them.

Worked mainly in oil pastel on paper, the drawings are made in a rough, immediate language, with flowers built from loose gestural marks and figurative scenes set like small windows within wild fields. Hashemi and Erfanian do not divide a composition between them. One may begin and the other finish, or both may work on the same surface at once, so that individual authorship gives way to exchange.

The scenes come from real moments of care among friends and chosen family, and carry long, poetic titles rooted in the artists' practice of letter writing. In Let's slide through life together until old age (2026) three friends imagine a shared future, while Dance as if the night were endless, as if the sky had forgotten how to rain bombs on those you love (2026) shows four figures arm in arm, joy insisted upon under the threat of violence.

Hashemi (born 1991, Tehran) and Erfanian (born 1990, Mashhad) are Iranian artists who have worked together since 2021, and whose collaboration has been shown at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and the 17th Biennale de Lyon, following a residency with the Pinault Collection in Lens. As the text by Yalda Bidshahri puts it, the show proposes "that we might become softer without becoming less resilient, that care for another can itself be a way of enduring." It runs alongside A Momentum for the Horizon, an Artist Room by Alaa Itani.