121.9 x 152.4 cm
In Vide Silencieux - Échos du Nord, Maryam Izadifard transforms the quiet interior into a site of resistance and remembrance. Her paintings, born from a residency in Finland, are shaped by the northern light and its long silences, yet they speak of exile, migration, and the lingering echoes of elsewhere. Within sparse domestic spaces such as an ironing board, a coat rack, a shelf, or a sink, symbols of care and labor intertwine with allusions to sacred iconography. These settings become charged sanctuaries where the intimate and the spiritual converge, revealing the persistence of ritual within displacement.
Izadifard's work draws upon the language of icons to question what is venerated and what is silenced. By integrating imagery reminiscent of Orthodox devotional art and subtle references to women's oppression, she reclaims the domestic as a realm of both containment and resistance. Her interiors, painted with subdued hues and diffused light, hold fragments of protection: hidden altars, small relics, whispered prayers. Through these images, she gives form to invisible histories of endurance and to the spaces women have carved for survival and reflection.
Each painting in the series suggests a hiding place, a site where memory gathers and protection is improvised. Objects become witnesses: an iron emits both heat and silence, a cord binds two worlds, a faucet mirrors a distant icon. These metaphors extend the idea of roots beyond geography, into the persistence of gesture, the continuity of devotion, and the quiet transmission of culture across exile. In her careful balancing of absence and presence, Izadifard traces how the displaced body anchors itself through small acts of faith and care.
Vide Silencieux - Échos du Nord invites the viewer into an introspective encounter where silence is not emptiness but resonance. It is a silence that carries the weight of what has been endured and what continues to endure. Through her restrained yet deeply evocative visual language, Izadifard transforms solitude into testimony. Her work becomes a meditation on how, even in exile, roots adapt, finding new soil in memory, tenderness, and the unspoken strength of women's worlds.
