08/17/2026
Thursday, August 20
7:30pm
$10
This August, Shadow Kitchen welcomes back alum, artist, and author Navid Sinaki for an evening exploring the overlaps between his writing and art making practices.
Sinakiโs work merges cinema, pop culture, and Persian folklore through digital and analog media ephemera: love letters tucked into DVD menus, turn-of-the-millennium animations, and VHS tapes from films that donโt exist.
His first solo exhibition, THE INFINITE GARDEN, is an invented Persian epic revolving around a king and his three male lovers, rendered across video, digital slide shows, and fabricated archive objects drawn from Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design. His visual work shares the same preoccupations as his debut novel, MEDUSA OF THE ROSES: q***r Iranian identity, myth, and the charged beauty of things hidden or lost.
The evening opens with an artist talk on the writing and making of MEDUASA OF THE ROSES, followed by two short film programs. The first screens Sinakiโs own films, including RUMI AND HIS ROSES (2022), a film made alongside the writing of the novel in which a gay Iranian recounts his first relationship through bootleg DVD menus. The second program turns to Sinakiโs cinematic inspirations and culminates in a single-channel presentation of THE INFINITE GARDEN (2024).
Join us on August 20 at Coaxial Arts for an unforgettable artist talk, in which Sinaki shares his creative inspirations, screens his own films, and reveals a few surprises along the way.
Navid Sinaki
๐๏ธ Tickets in Bio
