Faded Figures in a Greenpoint Window
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
