Watch Now: Shirazeh Houshiary

Presenting with Lisson Gallery at Frieze London 2022 as part of Indra's Net curated by Sandhini Poddar

Shirazeh Houshiary has been making paintings, sculpture, drawings, video animation and public art since the early 1980s — works which engage us in a phenomenological understanding of space, while evincing the labour intensive process of their own making.

Houshiary’s new painting, The Songs of the Earth, 2021, is unique in her oeuvre, which tends to be more abstract and metaphysical in nature. However, it is entirely in keeping with Houshiary’s deepest existentialist concerns and ongoing readings on biology, evolutionary thinking, and planetary consciousness. She states, “I have spent my entire time weaving the interconnected net of life with the thread of breath. The net reveals the connectedness of everything in the universe: the stone, to bacteria, to frog, to me and you, and to the other side of the universe. It has been a powerful journey. You can call it Indra’s Net or web of life or web of meaning or spider’s web.”

About Indra's Net

Derived from ancient Buddhist and Hindu thought forms, Indra’s Net refers to an ethics of being, where an individual atom holds within it the structure of reality. Imagine a vast bejewelled net: at every nexus there is

a reflective orb that mirrors and refracts every other orb in its entirety. Each part is held within the whole in a system of dependent origination. All sentient life is interconnected; shifts to one atom subtly alter the rest.

Curated by Sandhini Poddar, this group presentation brings together leading international artists whose practices are informed by this prescient metaphor. In various media, we learn of ancestry, history, language, consciousness and futurity as being bound to the earth, which serves as a perennial witness through the arc of time. 

In the video above, Houshiary shares her response to the question, 'What does interconnectedness mean to you?'

Find Out More about Indra's Net