Dorsa Asadi
Dorsa is a visual artist based in Tehran, working primarily across ceramics and installation. Her practice focuses on narrative installations inspired by the storytelling traditions found in Iranian ceramics, tile work, and illustrated manuscripts. It examines the intersections of dominance dynamics, gender, and the Anthropocene through reimagined mythologies that weave together themes of sacrifice, death, and rebirth, while drawing on the histories and recurring patterns of resistance among marginalized communities. She received her BA in Applied Arts and her MA in Painting from Tehran University of Art and has held three solo exhibitions.
Vivid Vessels (2026)
Dorsa Asadi considers life as a force that continues by taking different forms. Inspired by ancient clay vessels used as coffins, in which bodies were buried in fetal positions, Asadi imagines the vessel as both tomb and womb, a body containing another body, where death becomes a passage towards renewal. A skeleton rests inside a clay vessel as plants and flowers grow across and through its remains, blurring the boundaries between body and new life. Made in the aftermath of war and a profound encounter with hopelessness, the work draws on the poetry of Omar Khayyam, where the body returns to earth as grass or becomes clay shaped anew by the potter’s hands. From body to clay, vessel to skeleton, and finally to flowers, matter moves through an ongoing cycle of transformation, carrying forward the possibility of resistance, hope and rebirth.
This artwork spotlight is part of عزیزم، دنیا گلستون میشه یک روز / ‘My dear, one day the world will bloom into a garden’, conceived by Yalda Bidshahri for the ROSVÂ Summer 2026 Guest Curator Residency.