The ongoing series “Breath,” started in 2019, is an introspective reflection on the female experience in the face of existential and societal trauma, navigating a territory where personal and sociopolitical overlap, and complex dualities like strength and vulnerability, expression and conformity, tradition and progress can co-exist. 

 

Asadi’s work is largely shaped by her lived experiences as a diasporic Iranian female artist experiencing displacement and her critical perspective on the complex socio-cultural landscape of Iran where politics of control hold the female body captive through disciplinary vehicles in the public realm and intertwine it in a complex web of sociocultural gender norms in the politicized domestic territory. She reclaims the body as the central formalistic and expressive element of her work to reimagine the body-power relationship.

 

Asadi unveils the intricate interplay between identity, agency, societal norms, and resistance in the battleground of the female body. The formalistic and expressive choices in the photographs on exhibit signify the existential tensions and the clashing dualities that the subject bears, owing to a deep fragmentation between the private and the public. Through a juxtaposition of the compositions that capture the same subject in intimate moments of reflection and states of extreme emotions frozen in time, Asadi exposes the viewers to the profound existential and psychological states of her subject, seeking provocation and self-reflection.

By taking away the externalities and pronouncing a state of stillness, coupled with a cinematic quality that contributes to a form of narrative ambiguity, she invites the viewers to construct their own narratives around the complex dynamics of self-identity and societal norms that the subject navigates.