Born in Tehran/Iran, Mona Hakimi-Schueler lives and works in Berlin. She studied Art and Art Education at the University of Osnabrück. Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and projects in Germany and abroad, including Fruchthalle (Rastatt), ifa Galleries (Berlin and Stuttgart), Essl Museum (Vienna), Haus am Kleistpark (Berlin), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Galerie Haus am Lützowplatz (Berlin), Shedhalle (Tübingen), Museum of Modern Art (Vienna), AB Projects (Zurich), and Krinzinger Projekte (Vienna). Her works are part of public and private collections, such as Essl Museum (Vienna), Badisches Landesmuseum (Karlsruhe), Municipal Museum (Rastatt), and Piepenbrock Collection (Berlin).
Mona Hakimi-Schüler's art reveals a deep longing for a place of beauty and peace, but also nostalgia and trauma. Her drawings and paintings, collages, reliefs and installations have a beautiful, strangely enraptured, dreamlike quality that sometimes resembles a nightmare. The spaces she creates for her visual narratives draw on Persian miniatures – a world that is very familiar to her – and bring together memory, fantasy and the lived present. In dealing with her fragmentary identity as an Iranian living in Germany, the artist combines historical events and cultural heritage with personal experiences and emotions, making them accessible in a haunting way.
More about the works
These explorations begin with the series of paintings Self-portraits (2006), in which Hakimi-Schüler negotiates the complex identities of Iranian women, including her own as a young woman in Iran. Created shortly afterwards, the series of small drawings and paintings on wood, Memory trace (2008), appear like stills from a sequence of memories from the artist's childhood and youth in Iran. Her explorations take a turn and enter a new phase with the collage and installation Where the horse dies (2024). Created in response to current events in Iran, this work conveys the artist’s changed relationship to the social dimension of the ‘self’ that binds her to her origins as a native Iranian. It reveals a new presentness, once again evaded in a symbolic landscape, and a liberation from the past, albeit one permeated by violence and pain. The large-format relief painting Morgengrauen (dawn, 2024) can also be placed here.
These works frame Hakimi-Schüler's oeuvre, which includes extensive series and installation projects. She interweaves mythological references with personal memories to create multi-layered, multi-dimensional visual worlds. Animals populate these worlds, accompanying the artist's alter ego through distorted visual axes, cramped architecture and dreamlike urban landscapes, as in the collages and drawings of the series Stories I live by (2010-2012). The installations Helden-taten (heroic acts, 2009-2010), Lion on news garden (2014), and Head in clouds (2014-2015) focus on the symbolic figure of the lion, which has embodied the Iranian nation for centuries. While the lion represents strength and power, the numerous horses in Hakimi-Schüler's imagery are resilient in their sheer presence. They stand constantly and silently beside the artist's alter ego or take centre stage as life-size figures, as in Dreaming the past (2021-2022).
Similar to her early self-portraits, Hakimi-Schüler's three large installations Multi-bodies (2012-2013) address the strictly regulated and traditional female appearance and role models of Iranian society, reinterpreting them in a poetic and playful way. Going to the lucky house in white dress, leaving it with white shroud takes an Iranian proverb literally and dresses the bride in shrouds. A short path between holy shrine and bazaar equips the woman with fashionable accessories for the everyday battle on the street. And Not all heroes are registered plays with the performative, heroic masculinity celebrated in the traditional Zurkhane (house of strength).
Text by Hannah Jacobi