Abel Hartooni

As a painter and sound maker, Abel Hartooni firmly believes in the generative and mediatory power of art-making as a practice of weaving senses. Expanded painting forms the core of his artistic practice, a type of painting that merges with sculpture, sound, video, and writing. His fascination lies in how the process of making corresponds to the process of becoming and continuous transformation. Diverse inputs—usually theoretical texts, paintings from the past, social media, and nature—fuel his practice.

Before completing his Master’s in Fine Arts at KASK, Hartooni studied at the Tehran School of Fine Arts and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in painting from Soore University.

His latest project, Letters to Clouds, based on his personal diasporic history, is a meandering journey through the gradients of art history, anthropology, diaspora, and queer studies, where he investigates the relationship between the sky, the material history of painting, and the process of subject formation.

While studying in Ghent, Hartooni had the privilege of co-curating Meeting Grounds, an event devised by Paul Bailey at Kunsthal Gent, alongside fellow students. This event, along with his earlier community-building practices in Tehran—where he and his peers transformed their studio into a space for discussions, reading groups, exhibitions, and connections—ignited his passion for curatorial practices. In Tehran, they approached exhibition-making as a process of meaning formation and transformation, rather than a fixed plan that only reveals the end results to an audience.

Hartooni believes that curatorial practices, as sites of care and inclusivity, offer a platform to challenge and refine horizons, ultimately allowing for more meaningful engagements with other artists, cultural workers, and society.