Azadeh Elmizadeh,
A Hundred Tongues Lie Hidden in Silence, 2025 and Enfolding, 2025
Azadeh Elmizadeh (b. 1987) is an Iranian Canadian artist based in Toronto. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Visual Communication and Graphic Design from the University of Tehran in 2010, a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCADU in 2016, and an MFA from the University of Guelph in 2020. A Hundred Tongues Lie Hidden in Silence, 2025, and Enfolding, 2025, are from Elmizadeh’s recent Timekeepers series. To make the works, the artist bought bundles of linen from a bazaar in Tehran and took them to a mountainous region outside the city. There, using a technique known as frottage, she rubbed charcoal, ochre, and other natural pigments into the canvas as she pressed it against the rock, capturing the texture of the craggy natural surface. Then she rinsed and washed the fabrics in nearby streams and saltwater pools, finally laying them in the sun to dry. Back in her Toronto studio, Elmizadeh stretched the fabric and painted on the surface using diaphanous layers of oil paint.
For the past decade, Elmizadeh’s paintings have hovered between abstraction and representation. In the Timekeepers series, figuration comes in the form of ghostly birds that emerge from richly layered backgrounds of intense colour. About these works, the Toronto independent curator Nima Esmailpour writes: “Elmizadeh captures the graceful posture of migratory birds such as flamingos, herons, and avocets in their endangered habitats, while following their paths of iconographic influence throughout folktales.” The birds also suggest the simurgh, a benevolent bird in Persian mythology and literature that is akin to the phoenix of Greek myth. In Iranian folklore, the simurgh was believed to purify the land and waters and bestow fertility. Representing the union between the Earth and the sky, the creature served as mediator and messenger between the two realms.
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