Canvas

Their names are Elle and Belle, twin sisters birthed in a post-apocalyptic forest by a virgin mother who dies after delivery. As children they grow up roaming the forest, journeying through caves and into hidden worlds below ground and water, without true aim or intention.

Invented in 2019 by artist Dorsa Asadi, blue-haired Elle and red-headed Belle are recurring characters in her oeuvre and the protagonists in her most recent solo show Strange Fruit at Green Art Gallery, Dubai. This time, Asadi uses ceramic sculptures to depict a narrative based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, similarly divided into Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. In the series of 22 works, Elle and Belle are not quite Dante and Virgil; instead, they are agents of justice, doling out hellish punishments to naked and faceless men. The women kneel over a supplicating man engulfed in flames in Bending Sinnerman offering his burning flesh to Elle and Belle (2022), his outstretched limbs suggesting torment while the siblings’ arms seem to bear the fires painlessly.

Nationwide unrest in Asadi’s native Iran during the autumn of 2022 is the instigator for Strange Fruit. Security forces killed and injured scores of protestors speaking up for women’s rights following the death of Mahsa Amini and the rape of a teenage girl. The bloodiness of these months is expressed in the wounded reds and fiery oranges of Asadi’s Inferno, where ceramic tableaux present “sinnermen” in states of fear and suffering. The pieces are clustered together according to their chapters, laid out on white tables in the gallery. The theme of protest runs throughout the titles: Strange Fruit, a song recorded by Billie Holiday, decries the lynching of Black people in the United States, and I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free (Asadi 2023), popularised by Nina Simone, was used an anthem by the 1960s civil rights movement. “These songs were the only way things that helped me survive that terrifying autumn,” Asadi says. “These women’s voices gave me strength and kept telling me that the struggling might never end, but we have to keep going.”