Without words
Hani Mikiyas

Hani has always studied people, though, not in the way most artists do. Before she ever touched a canvas, she worked as a social worker, sitting in the rooms of women who carried many different lives at once. She noticed what often goes unseen the way a body speaks without words. A glance away, a back turned, the looseness of a hand at rest. For her, these gestures said more about someone’s state of being than what they told her outright.

For eight years, Hani painted without a stage. She found in painting a way to hold what she had witnessed: the presence of women outside of performance. Her figures are large and filled with color…blues, purples, red tones that stand in for emotion rather than skin. Their bodies bend, sit, and stretch across the canvas as though claiming space that is theirs alone.

This exhibition is about presence. It’s about how emotion takes shape in the body, how vulnerability lives in the everyday. In a moment when women’s experiences are often reduced to categories, Hani’s work resists. It shows the

fullness of feeling that cannot be narrowed down, the body as both subject and storyteller. What matters here is not performance or presentation. These works open onto the unguarded moments when women exist without needing to explain. In a time when women are constantly asked to account for themselves, Hani offers a pause.

She paints the body as it is, full of expression, alive with feeling, impossible to shrink into one story. To stand before these works is to pause and look closely not for narrative, but for signals. The tilt of a figure, the way color swells and folds, the details that ask for a second glance. Each canvas holds more the longer you stay with it. The experience is less about decoding and more about noticing, allowing these women to be encountered as they are, in all their depth.