Exhibitions
FILSOOFI | TURNER
ZieherSmith / 1207 South Street May 30 - June 28th
Raheleh Filsoofi, Vadis Turner
We are honored to inaugurate our new gallery with a dual artist presentation featuring two of the city’s most critically acclaimed artists, Raheleh Filsoofi and Vadis Turner. Filsoofi’s sound and ceramic installations fill the center of the main gallery, while Turner’s gilded fabric grids line the walls in relief. Specializing in mediums historically relegated as craft, their works take on performative qualities that evoke struggle and transcendence.
Raheleh Filsoofi will simultaneously open a solo exhibition at the Telfair Museum, Savannah, running May 30 - Sept 7, 2025. Vadis Turner’s monumental outdoor piece, Venus Rising, has just opened at LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, NY, and her work was recently exhibited at and acquired by the Museum of Art and Design, NYC.
https://www.ziehersmith.com/2025-may-filsoofi-turner
Iranian-American Raheleh Filsoofi is a poet, sculptor, and performance artist, and for our premiere exhibition, she perches ceramic vessels atop and inside open wooden pedestals that evoke centuries of plundered antiquities. Wires spilling out of the vessels and rise to the ceiling, powering hidden speakers playing ambient sounds from the South merged with traditional Iranian music. Reflecting the artist’s daily soundscape, the layered audio evokes memory, displacement, and the tension of navigating between geographies. Filsoofi’s work is the result of her lived experience as a woman, immigrant, and artist, in a time when being any of the three is cause for an abundance of caution.
In her own version of alchemy, Nashville-native Vadis Turner materially transforms mineral wool, ribbons and curtains into golden grids that consider feminine cultural conventions and behavioral expectations within the broader historical context of the South as well as the male-centric prism that dominates modern art history. Prompted by the monolithic, rigid grid of mid-century modernism, Turner embellishes her abstract lexicon with illusions to quilt squares and lingerie, referring to her compositions as “shape-shifting icons of femininity…. The golden-skinned forms hang from pins on the wall, gridded yet elastic geometric structures that are stirred and enlivened, rather than rigid. Draped like intimate garments and metallic like armor, the works embody the sensuality and malleability of the female-identifying experience.” Whether bowed, quivering, splintered or pinched, her pieces jettison past oppression, in essence shredding the cherished heirloom materials of domestic life.
Hours: Wed-Sat, 10 am - 5 pm. And by appointment.
Please check exhibition schedule as we may be closed between shows.
