SOPHIA HASHEMI

Harsh Is Where We Live

Microscope Gallery, New York, NY
March 2026

Press Release:

In the exhibition Harsh Is Where We Live, curator Evan Starling Davis presents a group of artists exploring what it means to reside in a world seemingly at odds with morality itself. Practically, the exhibition serves as a gathering space, interweaving the work of seventeen emerging artists responding to the sociopolitical conditions they embrace and refuse. It asks viewers to pause and breathe—to reflect. To listen. To reconsider what has been perceived as immovable truth. From this space emerges the possibility of a new vantage point: one that reconsiders our relationship to the world, our upbringings, and the environmental forces that have shaped our ways of seeing.

Across media and methods, works in the exhibition trace how large-scale forces: capitalism, patriarchy, colonial histories, technological mediation, social surveillance, among others, settle unevenly into everyday life. What emerges is not a singular image of crisis, but a series of lived registers: bodies carrying memory, landscapes marked by erasure, relationships strained by power, and interior worlds shaped by uncertainty.

Harsh Is Where We Live treats “harshness” not as spectacle, but as lived texture: something felt in the body, rehearsed in daily routines, metabolized through image, sound, gesture, and refusal. The exhibition unfolds as a constellation of registers and responses: some loud, some quiet, some unresolved. Together, they reflect the uneven ways reality presses upon us, and the strategies artists develop to survive it.

Photography by Jiayue Yu