Exhibition Review: Saba Farhoudnia's Cherished Ruins

Saba Farhoudnia. "Kissing Her at 11PM," 2025. Acrylic on canvas. 47 x 53.4." All images courtesy of Fou Gallery.  

By COLLEEN DALUSONG September 28, 2025

Recently I came across a video compilation of animals reclaiming cities during the covid-era lockdowns in 2020: hordes of monkeys foraging through the trash in Bangkok, wild goats roaming the streets of Wales, and thousands of flamingoes descending upon Mumbai while humans were tucked away within the confines of their homes. In the absence of humans, urban infrastructure and architecture soon assumed new functions, a concept which Saba Farhoudnia explores in her solo exhibition Forsaken with a Side of Pickles, curated by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani at Fou Gallery. 

Real and imagined buildings populate the world within Farhoudnia’s paintings. Last Petals at City Hall Station depicts the abandoned New York City Hall subway station as lush and tranquil. The train tracks now function as a canal, with a flamingo perched on the water as a monkey clambers over the tree branches that have now grown alongside the elegant grand arches of the station's Romanesque Revival architectural style. In Kissing Her at 11PM, stone columns inspired by the façade of the Brooklyn Museum are partially submerged in water, as swans wade between reeds and hibiscus flowers. Although there are no discernible human figures in these scenes, there are still traces of them present, from the grand architecture merging into the natural landscape, to scattered personal trinkets such as the love letter floating in the pond, or the watch with its hands frozen to 11 o’clock hanging from a swan’s beak.  

Saba Farhoudnia. "Last Petals at City Hall Station," 2025. Acrylic and alcohol ink on canvas. 16 x 20."   

Within Farhoudnia’s paintings, the notion of linear time collapses as relics of the past, present, and future exist simultaneously within one scene. This is evident in The Bathers, which features Eugène Delacroix’s 1854 painting of the same name as a mural in an abandoned castle overrun by dogs, swans, a tiger, and glowing mushrooms. Our understanding of time is further complicated by the presence of cave painting-style figures on the ceiling’s sculpted bas-relief, leading the viewer to wonder exactly which era of history we are being offered a glimpse into. Additionally, Farhoudnia’s usage of extreme perspectives in The Forgotten Role and Katrina and Jazzland effectively disorients the viewer while simultaneously offering striking vantage points from which to survey her scenes. The sharp oblique angles, partially inspired by the artist’s experience of watching trains pull into the station during her morning commute, obscure the vanishing points and allow the viewer to be engulfed within the world of the painting. We are able to see the abandoned buildings sinking into a lake, the dilapidated amusement park, and the remains of a plane crash, yet we are unable to fully comprehend how these landscapes came to be, nor do we know what will become of them.  

Installation view of "The Forgotten Role" and "The Bathers." 

Farhoudnia pushes this uncertainty further in Without the Voice Box, in which a lonely swan standing at the gates of Persepolis faces the past and the future simultaneously, as a ghostly Ada Lovelace-like figure sits in front of a computer monitor underneath the ruins of the ancient Persian capital. The rejection of linear time is strengthened by the right-to-left composition of the painting, echoing Farhoudnia’s native language of Farsi and resisting the traditional Western concept of visualizing the passage of time as a progression from left-to-right. Bathed in the cool grey of a bygone era and the golden light of a new dawn, Farhoudnia’s swan appears to be at a crossroads — human civilization has taken a path of destruction and violence, towards both nature and each other, is it possible to turn back the clock and forge a new path in order to reverse the consequences of our actions? 

It’s very easy to fall into the flattened cynicism of saying, “Humans are a parasite and must be eradicated off the face of the earth,” but Farhoudnia’s paintings offer an alternative to that viewpoint. Within these scenes, humans are not the overlords who displace animals, extract resources from the earth at an unsustainable rate, or exploit the labor of fellow human beings. Instead, humans are tiny figures who blend into the natural landscape, or they are represented by the beautiful yet crumbling architectural ruins, murals of Monet and Delacroix’s masterpieces, and miraculously intact jars of pickles. The mysterious world of Saba Farhoudnia’s paintings is slightly tinged with melancholy, but there is undeniable comfort and serenity to be found as we gaze upon the pearl necklaces and pomegranates strewn over a table, the lush vegetation quietly reclaiming abandoned architecture, and the lone swan standing before the gates of Persepolis. 

Saba Farhoudnia. "Without the Voice Box," 2025. Acrylic and alcohol ink on canvas. 36 x 48."

Forsaken with a Side of Pickles is open through November 12, 2025 at Fou Gallery, 89 5th Avenue, Suite #701, New York, NY.