Love Beyond Silence: Curated by Jasmine Melamed (Art Unmuted)
Balice Hertling Project Space
43 rue de Montmorency
75003 Paris
Featuring Shiva Babaei, Hilda Kheirabadi and Bardia Moradi
The exhibition takes its point of departure from Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel in which love exists not outside of history but within it, shaped by time, separation, uncertainty and memory. Invited to engage directly with the book, each artist offers a personal reading, translating its characters, themes and questions into a visual language of their own. The works are not illustrations of the novel, but three distinct ways of entering the same literary world and transforming it through contemporary Iranian artistic practice.
As Iran faces profound uncertainty and the reality of war, ideas of separation, absence, belonging and longing acquire a particular immediacy. The works move between the intimate and the collective, between what can be spoken and what remains unspoken. The title emerges from this tension: silence can be imposed by circumstance, but it can also hold memory, intimacy, longing and resistance.
Jasmine Melamed is the founder and curator of Art Unmuted. Working from outside Iran, she is conscious of how often Iranian contemporary art is viewed primarily through the lens of its political circumstances. With Love Beyond Silence, she sought to create space for something more layered, allowing Iran to be encountered through the interior lives, imagination and emotional landscapes of its artists, in dialogue with García Márquez, with one another and with a new audience.
Shiva Babaei (b. 1981, Iran) lives and works in Tehran. She holds a B.A. in Painting from Sooreh University and an M.A. in Painting from the University of Tehran. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, she develops abstract paintings through processes of addition, alteration and removal. Her series considers the passage of time and its imprint on human experience: waiting, loss, illness and return. Earlier marks remain embedded within subsequent ones, allowing the surface to hold traces of what came before. She has exhibited in Iran and internationally, including at Choom Gallery, O Gallery, Dastan Gallery and Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai.
Hilda Kheirabadi (b. 1988, Sanandaj, Iran) earned her bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts (Painting) from the University of Science and Culture in 2015. In her series The Story Márquez Did Not Tell – Cholera, she looks beyond the metaphor of cholera towards those the story left in the shadows: the ones condemned to bear pain, rejection and loneliness, and ultimately erased from the narrative. Her paintings bring these marginalized figures back into view. She has taken part in several group exhibitions, including at Nat Gallery, Sayeh Gallery, Gallery No. Six and Leila Heller Gallery (2026).
Bardia Moradi is an interdisciplinary artist. Originally trained in petroleum engineering and modeling, he gradually expanded his practice into the visual arts, fashion, sculpture, object design and creative workshops. Working with the body and image first led him to painting and performance, and later to fashion
and textile design. Today, his practice is a dialogue between painting, fashion, sculpture, design and society, in which each work is both a personal statement and part of a collective experience. He presents the series Endless Limbo (2026), in acrylic and oil stick, including on handmade canvases. In 2026, he also exhibited his work at the Palazzo Medici in Florence.