Thorns In Your Side
July 11 — August 11, 2025
Opening Friday, July 11, 5-9 PM
Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles
Press Release
About
House of CoHit is pleased to present Thorns In Your Side, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Iranian-born artists Haniko Zahra and Affsoongar. This is the first time each artist is working with House of CoHit, and it marks Affsoongar’s first U.S. showing.
Affsoongar’s small-scale line drawings, rendered in a limited color palette, and Zahra’s larger oil-on-canvas paintings share a fascination with storytelling, symbolic imagery, and the complexities of interior life. Both artists build their visual universes from small, seemingly ordinary moments or materials, transforming them into charged, layered tableaux where humor, violence, and desire intermingle. While distinct in style and sensibility, both sets of work explore the tension between surface innocence and inner unease, crafting visual worlds fraught with vulnerability, danger, myth, and memory.
Tehran-based artist Affsoongar constructs intricate narrative scenes from modest and everyday materials – pencil, crayon, marker, gouache. Her line drawings are deliberately executed in a naive, childlike manner, yet their thematic weight is unmistakably adult: defiance against restriction, the assertion of female agency, and the reclamation of myth and history for personal expression.
While Affsoongar draws inspiration from poetry and music, her visual language is rooted in Persian miniature painting, a tradition she consciously appropriates and subverts. Where classical miniatures centered heroic male figures, her protagonists are women—often versions of herself, marked by her signature unibrow—who act as the heroes of their own mythic narratives. These figures appear unshielded, unprotected, naked in untamed landscapes, surrounded by animals and trees imbued with subtle anthropomorphic cues. Nature in her work is not a backdrop but an active, witnessing presence.
Haniko Zahra (b. 1989, Tehran, Iran) is a figurative painter based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in Painting from UCLA in 2024. Zahra’s oil paintings blend radical figuration, surreal narrative, and psychological exploration, touching on themes of identity, vulnerability, violence, and humor. Her work has been included in various group exhibitions and is gaining recognition for its conceptual depth and painterly innovation.
Haniko Zahra presents a series of lush, unsettling oil paintings that transform mundane moments into scenes of psychological tension and ambiguity. Zahra’s paintings begin with ordinary observations—a passing glance, a fragment of film, a childhood memory—but what emerges is far from simple documentation. Each canvas refracts these sources through an emotional and imaginative process that unearths buried fears, contradictions, and desires.
Zahra’s use of animals as recurring symbols gestures toward something primal and unspoken—the wildness that lurks beneath our most domesticated personae. These animals, often tucked into corners or frozen mid-movement, act as witnesses or provocateurs, subtly destabilizing the already-fraught human figures they accompany.
Despite differences in scale and media, both artists begin with a preliminary sketch that loosely lays out the composition; details, colors, and forms are allowed to emerge gradually as the work takes further shape. Their practices also share a quality of emotional excavation — turning inward to process the tensions of selfhood, femininity, and cultural memory, then offering the results as uneasy gifts to the viewer.