Shirazeh Houshiary is concerned with the minutiae of our existence. In hands-on form, the Iran-born artist adroitly biologizes an epistemology we’ve long deduced to organized, categorical forms. Instead of ignoring the great philosophical questions of time and space, she patiently uncovers the feelings that arise when we allow natural processes to coexist with our questions of place in a vast endlessness. Through this hybridity, Houshiary opens a portal to a new world in her exhibition, The Sound of One Hand, on view at Lisson Gallery this fall.

When I speak with Houshiary about the exhibition, our conversation is rather mimetic of the art itself. Piece by piece, layer by layer, molecule by molecule, we peel the exhibition of its individual boundaries, moving through the functional appendages of The Sound of One Hand until they are all but collections of molecules, coalescing around some faint gravitational core.

First, we speak of “Enchanter” (2024). Houshiary cites carbon particles as the referential basis of the piece—each particle linked in a solemn cooperation of the natural process. One of the largest pieces in the exhibition, “Enchanter” establishes the basis of our position in our viewership and in the universe. Houshiary concisely draws these parallels in the scale and size of the piece: we are enveloped into the natural world because we exist within it. As the viewer moves toward the piece, however, one observes an even more miniscule natural process at work, mimicking cells and their microchemistries. She explains, “Humanity has lost connection with what I call deep time. I have tried to bring that into my work and to my own psyche in the way that I spend my life and connect to the natural world, to the way that nature works and to the way that I am part of this planet. I’m not an isolated being. And if art has any purpose right now, for me, the biggest purpose of making art is in educating myself and cultivating the self.”

Nothing about Houshiary’s practice is programmatic, but rather a meditative stream of consciousness peering into the depths of nature. In fact, there is no single medium to which Houshiary might constrain herself. In “Maelstrom” (2022), Houshiary uses anodized aluminum bricks, emulating polynucleotide chains in a reimagined DNA sequence, fragmented across physical space. Pieces like “Maelstrom” are always buildable and ever- evolving, changing to the needs of what Houshiary is trying to get across. “A lot of the work was made out of glass. With glass blocks, you can see them and they’re very beautiful,” she says. “They’re transparent and I love the transparency, because I could actually have an object that feels as if you could see right through it, as though the inside and outside of it overlap and become one. [When there is no] materiality, it is as if the air has become the material of the object. It was much easier to create just the outline of the form.”

Forms, boundaries, subjugation: Houshiary is imminently aware of humanity’s place in the universe’s natural processes, urging us to leave behind these impositions—be they rules, identities, or other makings of social construction that limit perspective.

“Science tells us that the material world [and the universe] is in the process of disintegration. But yet, life is negative entropy. Life has tried to survive. This is a very, very powerful thing. Life somehow continues. If a cell in your body dies, it regenerates itself through creating itself continuously, in every way possible. It has actually managed to survive for 3.5 billion years on this planet. So life is a negative entropy. Life is the opposite of entropy, even if it’s temporary. Everything is recreating itself. It’s become a generative story.” Houshiary examines.

Fascinated by the inner workings of this cycle, she magnifies the intricacies viewed at the cellular level in “Earth Lament” (2023). The painting is foundational to understanding Houshiary’s reflections on scale, exploring the modalities of ambiguous cool-hued figures across the large canvas. Her technique bids candid reflections on the creation of our cells, using pigment and pencil to flood the canvas in fluid forms. “I use pigment and water,” she tells me. “It’s much more like a sediment [this way], and I flood the work with water and let the sediment be. The pigments are like sediment. I like the idea of the natural process in my work, existing the way that we all come to existence. Even we have come out of natural work. Unlike what we think, we haven’t come out of anything else but out of these natural processes.”

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On the varying modes of scale and size in her work, Houshiary articulates that her art “can be observed in a small cellular structure and also in a vast cosmic way. We all have this in ourselves, [the] possibility of this scale.” All of the universe’s scale is in between two points, she explains. Somehow, the points are not separated, they are connected. “This is why I enjoy creating that in my work. I hope to remind people that looking at the world with one lens on only one scale is dangerous. The universe is made out of huge amounts of different scales, and perception is a problematic area because our perception is designed to see the world at only one scale.”

The viewer engages with Houshiary’s different forms to disarticulate a one-dimensional approach to perception. “I use everything. I paint, I make sculptures, I even make film. I do everything because I found different mediums have different possibilities. Each one challenges me to experiment. I like experimental work. All my paintings, for example, are experimentation. Ultimately, the fact is that I put this work on the floor, I pour, I flood this with water and then I put the sediment or the pigment on it. The whole thing is about not knowing where you’re going. It’s not about knowing where you’re going because that’s boring. I’m very limited. I want to open myself up into the universe. So if I want to do this, I have to take the risk and to open up. Experimentation is a part of my being in some ways. I experiment all the time and sometimes it fails, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s exciting. But even then, there is no failure because it’s like saying the natural word fails. How can the natural world fail?”

Houshiary’s exhibition must be physically experienced to feel the depth of her celestial ruminations. “My work is difficult to photograph because when you photograph, you only have one dimension of the painting.” The works live in the space they take up, drawing attention to our surreal acknowledgement of the natural world in the current moment we view them. Computerized apparatuses might be helpful for their promotion, but we must use them conjunctively in regard to physicality and the natural world. “In person, you can experience it from a distance and you can be very close to it, almost intimately, as if your breath is touching it. There are so many different layers in the painting and there’s so many different spaces that you’re going to miss, and it becomes flat and non-experiential. That’s why it’s sometimes impossible to photograph. Ultimately, you need to stand in front of them because they’re very much about the sediment, the watermarks, all of those incidentals, like the algae or the lichen. All of these materials have brought us to exist, single-cell structures and so on. They have those qualities and they want you to absorb, to experience that—not to see it as a flat image, it can’t work like that. They have a very textual quality. They’re full of texture.”

Houshiary leaves us with much to think about in The Sound of One Hand. She concludes: “It’s so important to free the human being from its constructed false information that we have about ourselves and try to open up who we are to something which is more beautiful and more meaningful. It gives each one of us a purpose of being in the world. Rather being so constricted inside this small and narrow constraint of the world that is trying to tell you who you are, we must remember we are not those things, we are free, we are open. There is no border, there is no boundary, we are all in this universe. What is happening in Gaza or Ukraine is a product of this narrow mindedness, this closed vision, this vision that cannot see that this planet is interconnected. Just be human.” 

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