Faded Figures in a Greenpoint Window

A windowed storefront has two open windows that frame a central green door. In twilight, four paintings are illuminated by streetlights, made of various colors. One hangs on the left and three are complied on the left.

Installation View, Hoda Kashiha: The Doubt Between Us Sways Like Hung Mirrored Eyes, episode, NY, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and episode, NY. Photography by Archtechtonic.

Two barriers separate us from the uncanny female figures populating the paintings in Hoda Kashiha’s The Doubt Between Us Sways Like Hung Mirrored Eyes: dusty windows and a three-foot steel fence. The figures are already ghost-like. In the left window, two plaintive eyes fade into what looks like a lavender curtain. On the right, the outline of a comically undersized head can barely be seen against a cerulean sky. Shadows cast by the morning April sun obfuscate them even further. The obstructions created by the architecture and light of episode’s window gallery alienate Kashiha’s women from the viewer, while also teasing us—even beckoning us—to come closer.

Painting of two eyes, looking at the viewer. The eyes seem to be part of dusty purple fabric, which covers the image's surface. A hand reaches up and touches the fabric, creating creases and folds between the eyes.

Hoda Kashiha, Folding gaze, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 37.8 inches (122 x 96 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and episode, NY. Photography by Archtechtonic.

As I leaned against the fence to take a picture of the lavender painting, Folding gaze (2025), I noticed my own arm in the window, overlaid on the hand that runs along the canvas’s proverbial seam. The configuration of my fingers was almost identical. Despite the barriers that separated me from the work, I saw myself literally reflected in it. This tension between intimacy and alienation, between ignorance and recognition, stands at the core of Kashiha’s recent practice. Though she studied at Boston University in the early 2010s, she spent the subsequent decade between Paris and her native Tehran. It was only last year, in 2024, that she came to New York City, completing a residency at Residency Unlimited and establishing a studio practice here. The episode exhibition marks her first solo presentation in the United States. All of the paintings on view were created after her move.

Two paintings are hung together vertically. The top, smaller painting is predominantly yellow, with a cartoonish figure reaching down a hole. The bottom painting is predominantly black, with a figure outlined in white reaching up.

Hoda Kashiha, The hole, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 14 x 18 inches (35.5 x 45.7 cm); 24 x 18 inches (60.9 x 45.7 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and episode, NY. Photography by Archtechtonic.

Movement marks much of Kashiha’s work. In Folding gaze, the hand stretches to remove the curtain, perhaps hoping to reveal the face beneath. A diptych, The hole (2024), sees another arm reach through a pothole to grasp its fingers around the throat of a second figure, who struggles to stay in the sunshine rather than be pulled into an abyss. Anxiety laces The Doubt Between Us Sways Like Hung Mirrored Eyes, particularly in its more cartoonish moments. The fear that one will be restricted or (mis)recognized drives many of the figures in this spare, four-work show. In The nightmare (2024), a woman towers over a smaller figure whose head emerges from the lower left corner of the canvas. The woman’s breasts transform into bugged-out eyes, while a menacing grin stretches across her waistline. The smaller figure looks up with its mouth agape, screaming at what it has seen. But its terror is unfounded—the eyes and grin are probably a figment of the figure’s imagination. I partook in a similar act of misinterpretation when I viewed installation images online before seeing the exhibition. Because of my own predilections, I initially thought the smaller figure was a cat.

A diptych stands on the floor, folded like a half-open book. The figures stare at each other, the left image seeming like the mirror image of the right. The mirror image also has a bright read smear next to the lips, like a lipstick mark.

Hoda Kashiha, Mirror, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, hinged diptych. Each: 36 x 24 inches (91.4. x 60.9 cm) two canvases. Image courtesy of the artist and episode, NY. Photography by Archtechtonic.

Yet one painting finds its figure in a moment of quietude and resolve. A hinged diptych, Mirror (2024), engages in the exhibition’s most obvious act of doubling. On either side, a dark-haired woman stands with her chest out, her shoulders back, her face contemplative yet confident. A few details indicate that this woman is likely gazing at her reflection in a bathroom mirror: her slinky sleeveless slip dress implies that she has been caught en déshabillé, while the folds of pastel fabric behind suggest a shower curtain. A smear of red hovers beside the lips on the more muted of the two canvases. Maybe the woman has kissed her own reflection in an act of self-affirmation, or maybe she leaves a parting gesture for a lover before disappearing into the morning light.

The light of the morning sun warmed my metal pen as I scribbled my thoughts about the exhibition in a small notebook. As noon approached and the temperature rose, I removed my leather jacket to keep cool and once again found myself the mirror image of one of Kashiha’s figures, my dress draping down my hips much like the slip in the hinged diptych. As passersby came and went along the street, I felt like I had forged an ephemeral alliance with the women in the paintings, like we were enwrapped in some kind of unspoken, private conversation. It would be easy to read the unsettledness that defines The Doubt Between Us Sways Like Hung Mirrored Eyes as a reflection of the artist’s own situation, creating and exhibiting work in a radically new context. But her installation is also an invitation to intimacy; the affects in which her work traffics touch us all. Few can claim they’ve never felt misrecognized, never defiantly gazed into the mirror, never found themselves on the cusp of plummeting into a black hole. Kashiha bridges distances while minding the gaps—or more precisely, helps us see that those gaps are not so insurmountable after all. 

Side view of a store windowfront with paintings featured. The storefront is bordered with iron gates and trash cans are visible.

Installation View, Hoda Kashiha: The Doubt Between Us Sways Like Hung Mirrored Eyes, episode, NY, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and episode, NY. Photography by Archtechtonic.

Hoda Kashiha: The Doubt Between Us Sways Like Hung Mirrored Eyes is on view at episode from April 12 through June 27, 2025.


Elizabeth Wiet

Elizabeth Wiet is a writer, editor, and curator based in New York. Interdisciplinary in both method and scope, her research focuses on feminist and queer art, time-based media, and art from the Middle East and its diasporas. She is currently Deputy Editor at Topical Cream and Contributing Editor at Bidoun and has organized programs and exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery, The Kitchen, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She holds a Ph.D in English from Yale University and is in the process of completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Maximalism: An Art of the Minor, and with Bidoun, is editing the first monograph on Lebanese-Egyptian artist Nicolas Moufarrege.

Previous
Previous

A Car Driving Itself: In Conversation With the Directors of Pop Gun

Next
Next

Gregory Kalliche’s “Anvil”: a Digital Gesamtkunstwerk