Civil Art - Artist Talk with Curator
This reception is part of the public educational programming for Forsaken with a Side of Pickles, Saba Farhoudnia's second solo exhibition at Fou Gallery.
Guided by the artist Saba Farhoudnia and the curator Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani, this event delves into the emotional and psychological dimensions of the artist's work. Farhoudnia’s new paintings examine what endures when cultural landmarks are abandoned or overtaken by nature. On multilayered, sanded gesso canvases, she uses acrylic and alcoholic ink to mark points of no return, balancing weighty themes with humor and a light-hearted undertone. Her work suggests that traces of presence persist even when perspective is uncertain — after all, subtle reminders of life continue to appear across her imagined landscapes. Much like the Zone described by the Strugatsky brothers in The Roadside Picnic, a novel that has influenced Farhoudnia’s thinking about these works, the landscapes possess uncanny qualities and may even help to regenerate the harmony we have long lost.
Artist
Saba Farhoudnia (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) honed her skills by earning B.F.A. and M.A. from the University of Science and Culture in Tehran, Iran. Saba also received a second M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is an Artist in Residence at Wave Hill (New York, 2025), an Artist In the Marketplace fellow at Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, 2020), an awardee of the Queens Arts Fund Grant (New York, 2024) and an Artist in Residence at the Fashion Institute Technology of Art (New York, 2023). Saba’s work has been seen worldwide, including Rossi & Rossi Gallery (Hong Kong, 2025), Make Room (Los Angeles, 2024), Fou Gallery (New York, 2024/2025), Bronx Museum (New York, 2024), Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (New York, 2022), Reza Abbasi Museum (Tehran, Iran, 2002). Her work can also be found in such periodicals as Widewalls, Dovetail, BoldJourney, Tussle, Studio International, Art Spiel, Thalia Magazine, and Words Without Borders among others. Her work is in the collection of Spring Bamboo Group (Shanghai), Wind Collection (Singapore).
Curator
Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani (she/her) is a Georgian-born and New York-based independent curator, writer, and researcher. She holds undergraduate degrees in International Relations and Gender Studies from Tbilisi State University and Mount Holyoke College, and a graduate degree in Museum Studies from the City University of New York. Chkareuli-Mdivani's book, King is Female, published in October 2018 in Berlin by Wienand Verlag, explores the lives of three Georgian women artists and is the first publication to investigate questions of feminine identity in the context of the Eastern European historical, social, and cultural transformation of the last twenty years. Since 2017, Chkareuli-Mdivani has regularly contributed reviews, essays, and interviews to Artforum,Berlin Art Link, e-flux, Flash Art Magazine, Hot Coffee Conversations, Hyperallergic, JANE Magazine Australia,, Le Quotidien de l'Art, post.MoMA, NERO Editions Italy, Overstandard, Spaghetti Boost, The Art Newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail, White Hot Magazine, and others. She has curated over ten exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles (U.S.), Iserlohn and Berlin (Germany), Daugavpils (Latvia), and Tbilisi (Georgia). Her research involves the intersection of art history, museum, and decolonization studies, focusing on totalitarian art and trauma theory; she has extensively written on the erasure of culture and recontextualization of Soviet and contemporary art within Eastern European and Western contexts.
Civil Art is a nonprofit platform that empowers artists and allies to build sustainable systems of care through creativity and collaboration. Emerging from its debut project At the Table—a landmark exhibition at Rockefeller Center that raised over $200,000 to support Asian American artists and communities—Civil Art has evolved into a growing ecosystem uniting artists, gallerists, writers, and patrons in collective action. The organization fosters professional development through incubator programs for emerging artists, writers, and arts professionals, addressing the lack of clear pathways to stability in the art world. Beyond professional growth, Civil Art creates community platforms that use art as a catalyst for education, dialogue, and social connection. Rooted in the belief that collective effort can achieve what individuals cannot, Civil Art continues to build spaces where creativity drives progress and care becomes a shared practice.