Hot Coffee Conversation with artist Saba Farhoudnia and curator Nina Chkareuli

Published Thursday, October 30, 2025

I met Iranian artist Saba Farhoudnia last fall, and since then, we have been discussing collaborating on an exhibition. Forsaken with a Side of Pickles is now on view at Fou Gallery through November 12. This project brought out many cultural references as well as political processes that both Iran and Georgia share. It was a perfect reason to continue this conversation in textual format. Below is an exchange that includes some questions for Saba centered around the ongoing exhibition, and also a few that Saba asked me. We spoke about familiar places, what it means to be an immigrant cultural worker in the United States, and what are goals and processes are.

Nina: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?

Saba Farhoudnia: I am at Wave Hill Garden Cafe, drinking a Cafe Mocha, which sometimes they are out of the chocolate, and this makes you think about other options on different days. Even though this spot is far from me, I enjoyed the time I was an artist in residence and had coffee there. The main reason is the nostalgic feeling it gives me; this cafe reminded me of two cafes in my hometown, Tehran. I am looking at the garden, and outside the window, the shivers of pure sun coming from outside, the shadows of the leaves inside and outside the cafe, and the high ceiling make me feel small and drawn in by the architecture, a feeling I also carried at Wave Hill Garden. I also see some lovely elderly people, who may be having a date with themselves, enjoying their relaxing and chilling time in this café, after healing and breathing, walking in the garden. I think these moments are way more magical than what's hanging on the walls in cafes, in general.

Installation view, *Saba Farhoudnia: Forsaken with a Side of Pickles,* September 18-November 20, 2025, Fou Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Fou Gallery.

Nina: Let's talk about the title of our current show at Fou Gallery, 'Forsaken with a Side of Pickles.' How do its themes and works fit within the context of your practice?

SF: The title came to my mind for some reasons; they are not all connected, maybe if you hear them as an audience, but the feeling each of them evokes made me think of the title. As an immigrant artist who is warm but shy about socializing in a typical New York environment, I often feel I am forsaken in this career. The feeling of abandonment or being forsaken doesn’t always come from others; sometimes, you are the one doing this to yourself, to your career, or your paintings, etc. Of course, this title relates to a show that reimagines the architecture left behind in a time when humans are no longer there, but these structures can also symbolize any other objects or subjects around us, including ourselves.

Nina: Let's focus on one work that is important to you. What's its title? What was the process of creating it? Do you go through sketching out your ideas first?

SF: Answering your last question first — not at all. I don't sketch before I paint. In fact, I don't even know how the painting will look in the end. I treat my canvas as my sketchbook. My entire practice in painting is about responding to the fluid color on my canvas, finding familiar shapes through my eye filter, and adding concise images to the work. It's called Paradolia—the reason you can see some well-done elements painted beside simple painterly symbols is that I am trying to find a balance between what was there as a brush stroke and what comes on top of the background layer. This can be critical for some viewers; if they don’t read or study my body of work, it might give them a sense of carelessness from the painter, which I understand. However, some audiences love that organic simplicity, and it gives them more time to pursue the narrative and humor in the work. Sometimes, painting in a Wabi-Sabi way is necessary, and sometimes less is more.

Regarding my favorite painting in the work, I think Katrina and Jazzland pictured above is one of my favorites. I usually like paintings where my inner child and I both pursue the work equally, and it's a big challenge to know when and how the painting is finished when this happens. The painting was the first one I made, on top of a stretcher I built myself in a woodshop in Baltimore, grad school. That stretcher has seen so many paintings that it eventually failed as a support, but finally it held a painting that magically brings joy to viewers. This was the first painting I dropped fluid ink on, and it was the last I finished. From the title to how I painted it, to the childish toys I designed, etc., I feel a strong attachment to keeping this painting myself.

Nina: Where do you see your role as an artist in this turbulent world of ours?

SF: Like the moments spent gathering with your friends at a picnic or a burger restaurant, such as when you're eating your sandwich and start talking about what's happening in your life, eventually moving on to politics, life struggles, or other worries. I want to be an artist whose paintings capture and share this moment with people. I enjoy discussing universal issues openly in the present, but not radically, while sharing my joys, feelings, and emotions. I also aim to bring some laughter to the scene while you're chewing your pickles on your burger. I want to evoke the forgotten role of humanity in my paintings, reminding people to hope and find lightness, humor, romance, even in hectic situations, emphasizing what it means to be human. When people interact with my paintings, I want them to feel simple, light, hopeful, thoughtful, and transparent.

Saba Farhodnia: Imagine you are in your country after a long, exhausting day; where do you like to go to have some time for yourself?

Nina Chkareuli: If I am not tired physically, but just mentally or emotionally, I will take a walk in the Sololaki or Marjanishvili areas of Tbilisi. They are old parts of the city, with stunning examples of architecture that reflect various Georgian pasts, while also capitalizing on its European heritage. The streets are lined with old trees, and some buildings are fully restored, while others are completely falling apart, with massive cracks dividing the houses in two. I enjoy walking there, looking at the windows filled with houseplants in old-fashioned pots. Sometimes, you can see old books in the windows, and often there are reproductions of old masters’ paintings. I guess I prefer these parts of the city because they are untouched by change, bringing me back to my quiet, unhurried childhood in Tbilisi.

There are far more gentrified and more glamorous neighborhoods, but this is not the essence of what this town stands out for. The feeling I encounter in the old parts is fairly similar to what Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk terms as hüzün in his equivocal essays on Istanbul. For Pamuk, it is a sense of loss and melancholy influenced by the decline of the city after the Ottoman Empire. Although Georgia was never an empire, it did have a very strong and authentic national identity and memory that both continue to live on via culture and the arts, yet not politically. Visiting these parts of Tbilisi, I am better reminded of this. I would stop by a small coffeehouse and drink a cup of strong and sweet Turkish coffee to metaphorically toast Orhan Pamuk.

Detail, Saba Farhoudnia, The Dayless Garden, 2025. Acrylic and Alcohol ink on Yupo paper mounted on wood panel, 19.75 x 25.75 inches | 50.2 x 65.4 cm.

SF: What makes you want to work with Fou Gallery again, and what part of my work made you interested enough to collaborate with me on this show? What brought you joy during this show?

NC: It is my second collaboration with Fou Gallery, and I am excited to have worked on your solo show this year with their team. I believe that Fou Gallery stands out with its unique professional capacity to build a cultural space positioned on the intersection of contemporary art, traditional healing and craft rituals, music, and performances. It is deeply admirable today in the climate of a retracting art market and endless competition for attention.

Your artistic practice possesses an authentic originality that is always an important factor for me as I choose the projects to work on or shows to curate. The thoughtful and premeditated synthesis of semi-abstract backgrounds and compositions with archival elements and personal symbolism creates canvases that require close reading – another important factor. The narrative threads you weave by bringing in architectural examples of the past, with the revelations of our future, and possibilities of joyful picnics, give hope.

The most joyful and meaningful part of any curatorial project is to create a deep human connection with the artist that irreversibly translates into either private or public or public discussion of their art. The tiny details populating your canvases – pickle jars, Monet’s Waterlilies, white flags, tomato paste tubes, dryads, Frida, etc., all of them bring joy because they are unexpected and bring a smile. They remind me of drops of dew glistening in the early morning sun when you walk through a field or enter a garden.

Brooklyn Bridge - a pedestrian gateway to Brooklyn Heights, where many immigrant cultural icons of the twentieth century lived, including W.H. Auden, Salvador Dali, and Benjamin Britten.

Saba: What do you suggest to immigrant artists like me? What do you think they face the most challenges with, and what is unfair in their path compared to non-immigrant artists in the USA?

NC: My suggestion is to be guided by your own personal quest to express your individuality as an artist and thinker. Every artist is a thinker, although they use more concrete and visual terms to express their theories and hypotheses. Staying true to this long-term process is not easy and often contradictory, as we are pressured by the demands of the outside world, and for immigrant artists in the United States, it is even more difficult. Working on expanding a network of people who genuinely support your quest, be it writers, gallerists, collectors, curators, is a given mechanism for anyone in the contemporary art world, and for immigrant artists, it all takes a much longer time to build this web. Keep faith and never give up; that would be my best advice.

As immigrants, we are at a disadvantage because we need to establish our identity here from scratch without the physical or metaphorical security of home, and we need to find our professional and personal tribe in a country fueled by competition. Artists born here do not often face this struggle because they have some elements sorted out as they are born, which does not at all guarantee a positive long-term outcome. Building a presence and positioning your identity is an exhausting process for which immigrants are rewarded by opportunities provided by the country and by New York specifically. Yet, I also feel that being an immigrant is a blessing because it gives us a complex perspective, multiple languages, and multiple frames of reference we would not have otherwise.

Detail, Saba Farhoudnia, *The Bathers,* 2025. Acrylic and alcohol ink on canvas. 40 x 44 inches | 101.6 x 111.8 cm.

Saba: What is your dream day in your career that could truly make you happy? Afterward, you might need some time to achieve a totally new set of interests or goals.

NC: I love the question. Lately, I have been considering moving towards more academic goals, as this type of engagement with the art and art history will provide a fundamentally different structure. As my father is an academic and physicist, I have always admired the rigorous analysis and intellectual work of engaging with ideas offered through pursuing an academic approach. I also very much enjoy sharing these same methods within more accessible frameworks and have been doing it through this platform, exhibitions, artists’ talks, etc., for the last eight years.

But I have also realized lately that trying to do everything and raising my two children is an impossible goal. Something has to be a priority, so thinking of a dream day in the future I would say spending half a day working with primary sources in archives, writing about them, using art historical analytical toolkit, and spending the second half of the day with my children, talking to them without a phone in my hand, taking them to museums, walking a dog. I will still curate, and this platform will continue, but I have also realized that I do not need to fight for my place under the sun; the sun shines everywhere if you do valuable and meaningful work.

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