Isolated bodies, waiting for a touch: Tirdad Hashemi, Soufia Erfanian and Mahsa Saloor

Hua International is pleased to present Isolated Bodies, Waiting for a Touch, an exhibition by Iranian artists Tirdad Hashemi, Soufia Erfanian, and Mahsa Saloor, on view in Berlin during Gallery Weekend 2025.

Intestine disorder is a condition largely caused by stress and anxiety, which Tirdad Hashemi has experienced since childhood. As a transgender person, Hashemi has long focused on studying weakened, isolated, and reshaped bodies through their paintings. Drawing ill and malfunctioning intestines together with Soufia Erfanian, Hashemi’s partner, becomes a tender form of care within their relationship.

Scratchy Lungs Spit Midnight Blue, a poem by Mahsa Saloor, written in response to the drawings, allows Tirdad Hashemi to explore other aspects of the body—a process especially significant to them as a person of color who grew up in the community-oriented culture of Iran. The exhibition also includes oil paintings by Mahsa Saloor which explore tactile and sensual possibilities of the medium to evoke a sense of touch, desire, healing, and longing.

Together, the drawings of Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian and the paintings and poem of Mahsa Saloor gain deeper resonance and power through their connection based on intimacy, care, and collaboration.

Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian are a queer couple originally from Iran who now reside in Berlin, intertwining their shared life experiences into their artistic expressions. Tirdad Hashemi, with a background in fine arts and a nomadic existence, explores themes of identity, memory, and the pursuit of belonging through evocative paintings. Soufia Erfanian, trained in architecture and engineering, discovered in art a profound means of survival and self-expression beyond societal expectations. Their artworks reflect poignant narratives of human connection, capturing the complex emotional terrain of lived experience. Together, their practice embodies a shared journey of self-discovery and empathy, offering a testament to the transformative power of creativity and love. Their works invite viewers to reflect on universal themes of home, belonging, and the intricacies of human emotion.

Mahsa Saloor is an artist and writer based in Berlin, working across painting, poetry, and film. Their practice explores themes of nature, desire, relationality, and spirituality. Their paintings subtly address the increasingly fraught relationship between nature and culture, the mundane and the spiritual. The subject matter in the paintings range from mystical landscapes and ethereal figures to abstracted forms in nature and poetic fragments. The paintings function like fluid color maps charting sensual experience and spiritual buoyancy. Their poetry practice is centered around the relationship between queer desire, spirituality, and eros, aiming to activate the interiority of psychic life as a sensuous experience and to develop cosmologies that reconnect us to the sacred and the erotic.

For this series, Tirdad Hashemi, Soufia Erfanian, and Mahsa Saloor worked together as a collective.