Love Beyond Silence

Words From The Curator

Love Beyond Silence takes its point of departure from Gabriel García Márquezʼs Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel in which love exists not outside of history, but within it; shaped by time, separation, uncertainty, memory, and the circumstances of the world around it.

For this exhibition, I invited Hilda Kheirabadi, Shiva Babai, and Bardia Moradi to engage directly with the novel. Each artist read Love in the Time of Cholera through their own sensibility and experience, translating its characters, themes, emotions, and underlying questions into a visual language of their own. The resulting works are not illustrations of the book, but personal interpretations of it; three distinct ways of entering the same literary world and transforming it through contemporary Iranian artistic practice.

I was particularly interested in what might emerge when Márquezʼs exploration of love, time, waiting, desire, and loss is encountered through the experiences of artists living within the complexities of contemporary Iran. Today, as Iran faces profound uncertainty and the reality of war, ideas of separation, absence, belonging, memory, and longing acquire an immediacy that is difficult to separate from everyday life.

The artists approach these themes differently. Their works move between the intimate and the collective, between what can be spoken and what remains unspoken. In each case, the literary source becomes a starting point rather than a conclusion: something to be questioned, absorbed, fragmented, and ultimately made their own. As a curator working from outside Iran, I am conscious of how often Iranian contemporary art is viewed primarily through the lens of its political circumstances. With Love Beyond Silence, I wanted to create space for something more layered. The artists are responding to a universal literary work, but they do so from their own histories, memories, and realities. Their interpretations allow us to encounter Iran not simply through its current circumstances, but through the interior lives, imagination, and emotional landscapes of its artists. The title Love Beyond Silence emerged from this tension between what can be expressed and what cannot. Silence can be imposed by circumstance, but it can also contain memory, intimacy, longing, and resistance. Art can give form to what language cannot always hold. I am deeply grateful to Balice Hertling Gallery for giving me the opportunity to bring Love Beyond Silence to Paris and for creating the space in which these three artists can enter into a dialogue with Márquez, with one another, and with a new audience.

Jasmine Melamed Founder & Curator, Art Unmuted