Vitreous Moments

Press Release

O Gallery presents “Vitreous Moments”, a collection of glass works by Elmira Abolhassani (b. 1989 Mashhad, Iran), marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Iran.

Having spent all of her life in major cities whether in Iran or Portugal, Abolhassani’s experience of living in the small village of Lybster in Scotland for forty days, surrounded by raw nature and far removed from urban prosperity, sharply altered her perception of lived contractual reality. Long-term internet outages that disrupted her routines, alongside severe cold and isolation, shaped a lived awareness of slowness and adaptation, unfolding as conditions rather than emergencies.
Developed over the past three years, the works on display emerge from Abolhassani’s engagement with glass as a fluid process rather than a fixed material. Through glass, she explores opposing states such as rigid and fragile, hot and cold, firm and fluid, while emphasizing its capacity to affect and interact with other materials. These qualities allow the works to approach questions of how individuals shape and influence one another. Alongside the glass works, a large-scale eco print is presented, extending similar notions of transparency and permeability.
Abolhassani had long followed socio-political news closely, a focus that deeply shaped her work. Her experience in Lybster, however, shifted this attention, revealing a world that extends beyond the accumulation of political maneuvers and constructed conflicts of war through which we often frame reality. This exhibition becomes an attempt to create a shared experience with an Iranian audience amid the country’s ongoing tensions, grounded in common roots and the possibility of mutual recognition across differing lived realities.