There Is a Light That Remains: A Conversation with Anahita Sadighi

 

Recently, TEETH had the honor of speaking with Anahita Sadighi, a brilliant gallerist and curator based in Berlin, Germany. Born in Tehran and raised in Berlin, Sadighi made a remarkable debut as the city’s youngest art dealer at just 26 years old. 

 

In her work, boundaries dissolve—visual arts, music, and performance converge into one. She acts as a bridge, shining a light on marginalized voices and carving out a space for compassion and understanding, something our world desperately needs, today more than ever.

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TEETH: Your practice merges past and present, blends media, and connects works across eras and regions. How did you arrive at the idea that all art can be contemporary?

Anahita Sadighi: I don’t think this understanding came as a single realization for me, but rather as something I grew into over time.

From an early age, I was surrounded by objects that carried history within them—Persian textiles, ceramics, and paintings—yet I never experienced them as something distant or belonging to the past. They felt present and almost alive. I remember spending hours on nomadic carpets, especially Gabbehs, which seemed to unfold into entire worlds. Through the stories my father shared, these objects became vessels of memory, connecting different places and ways of life.

This early experience shaped how I perceive art today. I don’t see it as something linear or bound to a specific period, but as part of an ongoing dialogue that moves across generations and geographies.

Later, through my work as a curator, this intuition became more conscious. I became interested in bringing together works that might seem distant at first—historically or culturally—but share a certain sensibility. For me, this is where art becomes contemporary, not because of when it was made, but because of how it speaks to us now.

What are the biggest challenges of being a gallerist and curator today? How do you navigate multiple roles, and how has that evolved over time?

One of the biggest challenges today is maintaining depth and integrity in a system that increasingly rewards speed, visibility, and simplification. The art world, like many other fields, is shaped by market dynamics and economies of attention. As a gallerist and curator, you are constantly navigating different expectations—from those of artists, institutions, collectors, to audiences—while trying to protect the complexity of the work. For me, the challenge lies in resisting reduction: not turning artworks into products, or narratives into slogans, but allowing space for nuance, ambiguity, and time.

At the same time, the role of the gallery has shifted. It is no longer just a space of presentation, but a space of mediation, responsibility, and care. In particular, when working across cultural or political contexts, questions of visibility and ethics become more central. Curating today is not only an aesthetic practice, but also a social one.

In response to these conditions, versatility has become essential to the way I work. My work moves between exhibitions, music, spatial design, and social formats, not as separate disciplines, but as interconnected forms of expression.

Versatility is also connected to femininity, not as a fixed identity, but as a way of being. I understand femininity as something deeply linked to creation: the ability to connect, to nurture, and to transform. It is a form of energy that is creative, intuitive, and responsible. Femininity is about openness, allowing for multiplicity and embracing complexity.

 

Your family has long been rooted in the art world—your father was both a gallerist and artist—and you also have a background in music. How has this shaped your practice and identity today?

I grew up in an environment where art was never separate from life; it was simply part of our everyday reality. My father’s deep engagement with art shaped me profoundly. As a child, I didn’t experience artworks as distant or untouchable, but as something you could live with, move around, even play with. At the same time, music played an equally important role. There was always music in our home. I was trained as a pianist from a young age, which taught me discipline, concentration, and a sensitivity to rhythm and structure. But it also came with pressure, and at a certain point I had to question this idea of performance and find a more open, personal relationship to art, one that was not defined by achievement or perfection, but by curiosity, expression, and inner resonance.

The path to where I am now was not entirely linear. After studying music, cultural studies, and art history, I worked in different institutions before opening my own gallery at a relatively young age. I wanted to create a space where I could bring these different dimensions into dialogue and develop my own perspective.

I think what brought me here is the ability to stay connected to where I come from, while allowing myself to move beyond it and shape something of my own. 

 

Your most recent exhibition’s title, Let Us Believe in the Dawn of Spring in Berlin, was inspired by Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad. What made her the right lens for this exhibition?

Let Us Believe in the Dawn of Spring emerged from a very intuitive place, but also from a certain sense of urgency. Forugh Farrokhzad’s work has been with me for many years. What moves me deeply in her writing is this tension between fragility and strength; a quiet, almost stubborn belief in life, even in moments of rupture.

The slight shift in the title—her original poem was titled “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season”—is intentional. For me, it is not about certainty, but about the act of believing itself, especially in times when belief can feel difficult. 

The exhibition also featured many Iranian artists during a time rife with conflict and destruction, yet it also contains a beautiful and powerful underlying tone of hope. How do you hold those two realities together in the curation?

The exhibition started with Nowruz, the Persian New Year. At its center is Gaja Vicic’s contemporary interpretation of the Haft-Sin ritual, which traditionally brings together symbolic elements of renewal, growth, and cyclical time. I was interested in how such a ritual can be translated into a spatial and sensory experience today, not just as something nostalgic, but as something alive.

The works in the exhibition engage light, memory, and perception as intertwined forces, often using layered photographic and material processes to explore how cultural imagery is transmitted and transformed. In Ghazaleh Rezaei’s Light Upon Light, architectural fragments from Persian wall paintings are repeatedly re-photographed, creating images where motifs appear unstable and partial—less as fixed depictions than as residual traces shaped by light itself.

This investigation continues in Hamid S. Neiriz’s photographic works from the 1970s, where projected light and ornamental patterning dissolve the boundary between portraiture and abstraction. The human figure becomes a surface for projection, shifting into a carrier of presence, texture, and inner states rather than a stable identity. A portrait of Jazeh Tabatabai, a central figure in the Iranian avant-garde and co-founder of the Saqqakhaneh movement, anchors this historical thread, recalling a moment when Persian visual languages were being actively reconfigured through dialogue with international modernism.

Across the exhibition, architectural details, reflections, and materials operate as vessels of cultural memory. This extended into Caique Tizzi’s sculptural intervention using lavashak (fruit leather), which introduces an edible, sensory dimension. Positioned between sculpture and gesture, the work invokes practices of hospitality and communal sharing associated with Nowruz, folding taste and materiality into a shared cultural register.

While shaped by the current political moment, the exhibition resists being framed solely through crisis. Instead, it considers how art can sustain other forms of attention—dignity, imagination, and resilience—without reducing complexity to urgency. Hope here is not decorative but practiced: something maintained through attention and care. The works collectively hold a tension between fragility and endurance, insisting that even within instability, forms of light and renewal persist.

Your practice is closely tied to current global realities. How can we support and sustain underrepresented voices so they continue to resonate?

I think the question of what we can do begins with something simple, but also demanding: how we choose to listen and act.

In a time of increasing polarization, many narratives become louder, more simplified, more rigid. What often gets lost in that process are those voices that carry complexity, voices that don’t fit into clear categories or dominant frameworks. Creating space for them is not only about visibility, but about attention, context, and responsibility.

At the same time, we have to be careful how these voices are framed. There is a tendency, especially in Western contexts, to reproduce familiar images that stabilize a certain narrative, the figure of the suffering Muslim woman as a projection surface. Such representations often continue an orientalist gaze, reinforcing simplified and external perspectives, while voices grounded in lived realities remain less visible. Change does not only happen through large, visible movements, but through more subtle, often overlooked forms of persistence. And it is exactly these nuances that need to be protected in how we curate, present, and speak about art.

 

What projects do you have in store for the near future? 

Looking ahead, I’m currently working on several projects that expand the idea of the gallery beyond a fixed space into something more collective and experiential.

One of the central projects is the development of Soft Power as an interdisciplinary festival platform. It will take place during Berlin Art Week 2026, bringing together exhibitions, performances, music, conversations, and shared rituals into a more open format. 

The idea is to move beyond traditional formats and create structures that allow for longer-term exchange between artists, audiences, and different communities. Especially in a time when fragmentation is increasing, I think it becomes important to create spaces where people can come together in more direct and embodied ways.

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Follow Anahita Sadighi via Instagram and stay up-to-date with her exhibition program through her gallery’s website.