The Unavowable Body: Radical Stillness in Mina Heidari’s Ineffable Art Series

Abstract

This article examines three artworks I conceptually frame as The ineffable art series by an emerging Iranian female artist Mina Heidari. This exhibition was initially showcased as a three-part drawing series at the 2025 World in Balance festival in Hamburg. The three artworks titled: Condemnation, Decay, and Denial/Refusal, are a meditation on feminine agency, embodied violence and the dialectics of silence and visibility. Heidari’s work draws from her multidisciplinary background in art, science and activism as well as her censored Iranian context. Employing a philosophy of silence and opacity, where the unspoken becomes a site of agency and resistance, her art transforms personal and political repression into a universal feminist poetics of liberation. Through the recurring motif of a metonymic eye, she traces contours of an unavowable body, from violent exposure to a sacred disavowal, challenging viewers to engage not through sight but through embodied presence. Blending ethical witnessing with posthuman and queer feminist lenses, my analysis underscores how Heidari’s drawings reconfigure the female body as a living archive of trauma and resilience. Ultimately, this article argues that Heidari’s art suspends narrative closure to enact ‘radical stillness’, an unspoken poetics that reconfigures embodied silence as a potent language of resistance and ethical witnessing. Using the female body’s fragmented vitality to defy patriarchal and colonial silencing, Heideri invites viewers to dwell in the unspoken— to honor the scars that persist, the fragments that haunt, and the opacity that protects, in response to acute and chronic trauma.