Online Exclusive

Arghavan Khosravi

A Window and a Cage

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography JAE KIM

A woman’s wrists are bound to an archway. An AirPod sits, improbably, in a Persian paradise garden. A sliced tree pushes out a single green sprout. In “What Remains,” Arghavan Khosravi‘s third solo show at Uffner & Liu, panels hinge open like small doors, black cords run between compartments, and a broken mirror returns your reflection in shards. At the heart of the exhibition are seven intimate works modeled on devotional altarpieces, objects that once promised resolution. Khosravi withholds it, turning her long examination of the systems that constrain women’s lives inward. We spoke with Khosravi about emotional residue, architecture as both window and cage, and why even her darkest images leave room for growth.

PLUS MAGAZINE The Altar Series draws from the structure of devotional altarpieces, from the hinged panels to the intimate scale and the sense of close looking they invite. What drew you to that format, and what possibilities did it open up for you?

ARGHAVAN KHOSRAVI The intimacy of these small-scale altarpieces stood out to me most. Unlike large altarpieces that become part of architecture, these were made for personal use and could travel with someone. I was really drawn to that idea of a close and private relationship with an object.

That also felt connected to what I was trying to do in this series. Compared to some of my previous work, these pieces feel more introspective and deal more with the emotional residue of growing up within systems that try to regulate women’s bodies and agency.

More generally, I’m often interested in taking forms or symbols from one context and placing them into another. I wasn’t drawn to the altarpiece because of its religious promise as much as I was engaged in its structure and possibilities. I had already been interested in multi-panel formats because, as an immigrant, that idea of existing in several spaces at once feels very familiar to me. A part of you still lives somewhere else while another part is trying to inhabit a new place. The altarpiece format naturally gave me a structure that could hold those different spaces together.

P That idea of occupying multiple spaces at once also seems to surface physically in Bound (2026), where the figure’s wrists are tied directly to the altarpiece arch. Did you always think of the architectural frame as something that could function both as an opening and a form of restraint?

AK I don’t think the architecture suddenly became a restraint. I think it always had the possibility of being both. In some works, the framed opening acts more like a window into another space, while in others it starts functioning more like a boundary or a cage.

I was drawn to that because it feels similar to the way power structures operate. They create systems that try to define limits, but people continue finding ways to live within them and push against them at the same time. In Bound, I was thinking about that tension. Sometimes even ordinary gestures, something as simple as braiding hair or continuing everyday life, can become acts of resistance when larger systems try to regulate your existence.

For me, the work is less about complete restriction and more about the tension between pressure and persistence.

P The interplay between different systems and visual languages appears again in the work featuring the single AirPod placed within a composition drawn from the Persian Chahar Bagh garden tradition. The object feels deliberately out of place at first glance.

AK The AirPod functions similarly to many other things I bring into my work. I’m often interested in taking objects or symbols from one context and placing them somewhere unexpected, creating a small sense of disorientation.

Most of the visual language in that work, from the altarpiece structure to the carved relief imagery and muted colors, carries a more historical feeling. The AirPod interrupts that atmosphere and suddenly brings the work into the present.

But it also became important structurally. The Chahar Bagh garden is organized around waterways, and I became interested in transforming that idea. The black cords connect the side panels to the central space, almost as if the flow of water is becoming transformed into the flow of sound.

More broadly, I’m interested in creating spaces where things that don’t naturally belong together can coexist. I think that tension between past and present, different visual languages, and different cultural references has always felt very natural to me.

P Fragmentation seems to operate very differently in Bearing (2026), where faces emerge and disappear throughout the composition while a figure holds up a structure leaking with oil. You also embedded a broken mirror into the work, so viewers encounter themselves only in pieces. How did you think about extending that condition to the viewer?

AK I wasn’t necessarily thinking about pulling the viewer into the work as much as expanding what was already happening inside it. Throughout the piece, different depictions of a face or identity are being interrupted or partially hidden. The main figure is obscured by the architecture and the black liquid, and then inside that dark recessed space there’s another face, an eroded and fractured stone relief from another time.

The broken mirror felt like another extension of that idea. When viewers see themselves in it, they don’t encounter a complete image either. They see themselves in fragments. So instead of keeping the viewer outside the work as an observer, I wanted them to enter into the same condition the figures are already experiencing.

P Listening to you speak about these works, The Altar Series feels more introspective than some of your earlier projects, especially in the way the images seem to hold emotion and distance at the same time.

AK I think what has changed most is my relationship to those experiences. I wasn’t necessarily working from other women’s stories before. I was responding to realities that felt collective, whether through family, friends, or larger social conditions, and I was part of that experience myself.

I’ve lived outside of Iran for more than a decade now, so I experience much of it from a distance. I still feel deeply connected to it emotionally, but not in the same immediate way. The Altar Series feels more like an emotional residue rather than an immediate response to those realities.

I think that shift naturally affected the work itself. The smaller scale, for example, felt appropriate because the work became more introspective.

P Even with all the tension running through the exhibition, the works never feel completely closed off. In Incision (2026), for instance, there’s a small green sprout breaking through the split tree. Did that image of growth exist from the beginning, or did it arrive gradually while making the piece?

AK You’re right that many of the works are suspended in a moment without a clear resolution. I’m drawn to creating images that feel paused, where you don’t necessarily know what happened before or what comes after.

But I think every work in the exhibition has some suggestion of hope, even if sometimes it’s subtle. In Incision, the sprout may be the most obvious example, but there are similar moments throughout the show: light emerging from a figure’s hand, a pomegranate tree appearing inside an architectural structure, or the Chahar Bagh garden. They just appear in different forms.

Including those moments feels important to me because it feels more honest to my own experience. Even when the work deals with pressure, restriction, or uncertainty, I’m not interested in complete darkness. There is always some possibility of growth or continuation within it.

Arghavan Khosravi’s “What Remains” is on view at Uffner &Liu, 170 Suffolk Street, New York, from May 15 to July 2, 2026.