Imagine a young ballerina holding onto knitting needles at home amidst gunshots and screams under the shadow of the curfew in Tehran in 1979. For Koushna Navabi, knitting or joining fabrics together was not merely a domestic handicraft or craft; it was an escape from the horror of the outside world created by revolution and forced migration, a bodily memory to take refuge in, and, most importantly, a mode of survival. Having to flee her country alone as a teenager when her school was closed after years of ballet training, Navabi places the sense of rhythmic movement and the tranquility imparted by knitting needles from that era at the center of her contemporary art today.
Sharing the background of her practice while completing two new works to meet viewers via the Don Gallery presentation as part of Frieze London 2026 taking place in October, Navabi summarizes the transformative power in her creative process in her own words: “For me, knitting is the language of labor and care. Processing stitches individually onto the canvas in my paintings changes the language of that surface. Using this meticulous language, I tranquilize all that chaos and noise of the Persian Gulf.”
One of the canvases she prepared for Frieze presents a cross-section of the seismic map of the Persian Gulf in the texture of an almost hand-knitted sweater. Looking at the region’s conflicted past shaped by colonialism and industrialization as an Iranian artist, Navabi nevertheless meticulously avoids her work turning into one-dimensional political propaganda: “I don’t want my works to be merely political; that is just one of the layers. Just like the layers of the ocean, the soil, and the paint on the canvas…” Resisting the ease with which the Western art world immediately confines artists of Eastern origin to a political category and “orientalizes” them, the artist desires her works to be read first and foremost on a human ground.
The other work featured in the exhibition is an anthropomorphic sculpture the artist constructed using tree trunks gathered from the environment, antique Iranian rugs, stitches, and polished bronze pieces. Returning materials abandoned by nature to life through a kind of metamorphosis, Navabi attributes her simultaneous use of both masculine and feminine forms in these figures to the fluidity of identity: “I believe all our identities are fluid. In cross-border and intercultural people who, like me, migrated not out of choice but out of necessity, this fluidity is a condition of existence. We are forced to adapt to the places we arrive at, and this condition is inherently metamorphic. I see transformation sometimes as violent, sometimes like a cry rising from the body, but always as a mode of survival.”
Referencing the transformations the female body has undergone throughout history—from Daphne, who turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo in Ancient Greek mythology, to Mashyān, who evolved from a tree into a woman in pre-Islamic Iranian mythology—the artist also frequently recalls the symbolism of knitting in literature. Like Madame Defarge, who transformed female labor into political power by knitting during the French Revolution in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, or Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, who unraveled at night the shroud she wove by day to control time…
Each stitch that Navabi individually depicts over months on canvas invites the viewer to slow down and deepen their gaze in today’s fast-paced world of consumption. Rather than offering quick fixes or instant consumption, she desires that as much time be spent in front of the artwork as the labor she expended on the canvas. Continuing to produce with the pure patience of handcraft in her studio in Northwest London, Navabi’s sculptures and canvases remind us of the reality that roots do not remain fixed, pain can be compassionately transformed, and identity is far too fluid to fit into a single geography.
Artist Note from NO-26 Editor
Artist: Koushna Navabi
Event / Gallery: Frieze London 2026 (Don Gallery Presentation, Regent’s Park, London)
Dates: October 14 – 18, 2026
Aura: A multi-layered artist practice blending personal migration memory stretching from the Iranian Revolution to the present day, seismic maps of the Persian Gulf, and found tree trunks with knitting, rugs, and polished bronze, transforming them into a narrative of survival and metamorphosis.
