Statement:

Scroll is pleased to present Under The Same Skin, a solo exhibition of new works by Nastaran Shahbazi, opening Thursday, September 10 from 6-8pm at 291 Grand Street. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Shahbazi’s new body of work came together over the last few months, when the artist started spending more time jogging in a large park on the hill of Montreuil, the eastern inner suburbs of Paris.

With everything happening in the world, particularly in her home country Iran, Shahbazi found herself returning to nature again and again.

Being among the trees gave her a sense of calm, but this environment also made her consider the fragile boundary between ourselves and the natural world. Sometimes, it felt as though we slowly dissolve into the surrounding landscape, becoming part of the same living presence.///

Shahbazi also kept returning to how conflict never only affects people – it leaves brutal marks on the land, the air, and the ecosystems around us. Human lives and the natural world are wounded together.

Under The Same Skin comes from this feeling of how people and the earth are deeply intertwined, sharing the same vulnerabilities. There is something beneath the surface, something unseen, that quietly binds us all together.

What interests Shahbazi is what happens after catastrophe: the moment when familiar ways of understanding the world begin to fall apart, and we return to our most fundamental relationship with nature in order to keep going.

In her new body of work, nature is neither refuge nor simply a landscape. Nature serves as the place where we begin to find ourselves again.

Across her soft, chromatic compositions, figures are fully immersed within bucolic fields or protected by the sinewing branches of trees overhead.

People enjoy moments of rest and relaxation underneath venerable trees and spin through tall grass while dancing and playing music.

Two women bathe in the radiant glow of delicate butterflies, a nod to the title of Shahbazi’s 2023 exhibition titled To The Butterflies, named after the book by Iranian poet, critic, and political activist Reza Baraheni.

The figures in Shahbazi’s new paintings gradually lose the boundaries between themselves and the world around them. They become part of the environment, not through control or escape, but through a shared fate.

This transformation is less about becoming wild than about returning to a deeper, more instinctive part of ourselves, where survival, the body, memory, and nature are still closely connected.

As with her overall practice, memory runs throughout this new body of work. It does not unfold as a singular story but appears in fragments that appear and disappear across the dreamlike compositions.

These moments connect personal memory with a shared human experience: the experience of finding our way after a rupture and rediscovering our intimate and instinctual relationship with the world.

Here, nature is never just nature. It is where memory thrives, where we face our own solitude, and where, after a rupture, we slowly rediscover our place within the world.