Aabee Bleue Project is pleased to present Whispers: Women, Animals and Chimeras, a solo exhibition by Elika Hedayat. The exhibition will be on view from September 26 through October 24, 2026, at Aabee Bleue Project in Los Angeles.
What if mythology could be retold through those who have remained at its margins? What if women, animals, and hybrid creatures became the protagonists of histories that have long centered heroes, kings, and conquerors?
In Whispers: Women, Animals and Chimeras, Elika Hedayat presents a new body of work that draws from Persian mythology, feminist thought, and speculative imagination. Moving between memory, history, and fiction, the exhibition revisits narratives from the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) through a contemporary lens, shifting attention toward figures that have often occupied secondary roles within traditional accounts.
Women, animals, and chimerical beings emerge throughout the exhibition as active agents rather than symbolic accessories. Their bodies transform, merge, and evolve, inhabiting spaces where the boundaries between human, animal, and mythical life become fluid. Through these shifting forms, Hedayat constructs alternative narratives that challenge established hierarchies and invite new ways of imagining relationships between power, identity, and the natural world.
Alongside these works, the exhibition includes paintings from Haroum, an ongoing series inspired by mythology as well as feminist and ecological science fiction. Drawing on literary references to Haroum, a legendary city governed by learned women living in harmony with their environment, Hedayat envisions an embryonic world in formation: a speculative landscape where coexistence, transformation, and collective imagination shape new possibilities for the future.
Blending historical references with contemporary realities, Hedayat’s works move between documentary traces and dreamlike invention. Reality, memory, and imagination intertwine to create narratives that are at once deeply personal and broadly political, connecting ancient stories to present-day questions surrounding gender, ecology, and the social fabric of the region.
Rather than reconstructing the past, Whispers: Women, Animals and Chimeras opens a space where myth becomes a living language through which forgotten voices, alternative futures, and new forms of belonging can emerge
