Wrestling with image and identity: Chalisée Naamani’s “Octogone” at Palais de Tokyo

In the hushed geometries of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, amid the heavy silences of history and the noise of global turmoil, Chalisée Naamani’s new exhibition Octogone opens like a quiet invocation. The Franco-Iranian artist, whose work consistently straddles the personal and the political, has composed a spatial and symbolic reverie—at once installation, procession, and arena—where bodies are sculpted, histories are contested, and clothing becomes both witness and weapon.

Naamani has long been known for her “image dresses”—digital collages sourced from her own photography and online ephemera, printed onto fabric and materialised into soft, sculptural forms. But in Octogone, these textile images enter a more embodied terrain: a meditative ring inspired by the zurkhaneh, or “house of strength,” a traditional Persian gymnasium where physical training was once inseparable from spiritual and ethical cultivation.

“I let myself be guided by the space,” Naamani explains. “I saw a half-octagon, and in it, an echo of the zurkhaneh. The resonance was immediate. This place shaped how I built the work—literally and conceptually.”

Indeed, the installation unfolds like a ritual choreography across a form that hovers between catwalk and combat pit. It is here that Naamani weaves together multiple bodies: the sculpted, disciplined body of her grandfather, a wrestler and boxer in Tehran, her own body, as both athlete and mother, and the digital bodies of anonymous others—lifted from the saturated timelines of social media, scanned from manuals and memoirs, conjured from diasporic memory.

At the heart of Octogone lies a reverence for her grandfather, a man whose masculinity transcended stereotype. “He had an impressive body, yes, but also a big heart. He cried openly. He was pious, elegant—he could cross Tehran to find a suit to match his car. For me, he wasn’t just strong. He was dignified.”

This complexity is key to the exhibition’s refusal of binary thought. Naamani does not simply challenge the Orientalist gaze on Iranian masculinity—she questions the very idea of fixed gender codes, drawing our attention instead to the ethics of embodiment. Her grandfather’s training tools, inherited and reinterpreted, are reassembled into poetic forms that converse with contemporary fashion and protest aesthetics. A pair of capri trousers, echoing the uniforms worn in the zurkhaneh, is embroidered with boteh jegheh (Persian paisley) and juxtaposed with underpants inscribed with the words “So we fought for a country of our own.” The boxer shorts—once a symbol of male bravado in the early 2000s, now reappropriated into women’s fashion—signal the ongoing flux of gendered symbols.

“I grew up in France where muscles are often seen as empty of meaning,” she recalls. “During art school, a teacher mocked footballers as stupid. But my grandfather—he built his body with intention. His muscles were about care, responsibility, survival.”

The exhibition also situates the ancient zurkhaneh within a lineage of resistance that extends to today’s Iranian feminist movements. “The zurkhaneh is not just about training warriors,” Naamani emphasizes. “It’s about cultivating ethical selves. The body becomes a tool for justice. I tried to draw that thread through time—towards the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement, which I see as one of the first feminist revolutions in history.”

That resonance was made visceral when, the day after Octogone opened, Iran was bombed. “It gave me goosebumps,” she admits. “For twelve days, we lived between worry and disbelief. The space of the exhibition changed—it became more urgent. I visited it every day, trying to speak to people, to transmit something. Western media were processing rather than witnessing. It felt like sitting at a table where no one listens.”

In Octogone, silence speaks louder than commentary. Images float without captions. Fabrics fold like prayer rugs. A drumbeat—suggestive of the murshed who leads training sessions in traditional gyms—lingers in the imagination, even if absent from the room. These are not spectacles to be consumed, but thresholds to be entered.

Naamani’s work is a transcontinental poetics that maps Paris to Tehran, textile to text, body to archive. Through the folds of cloth and fragments of memory, she invites us into a new kind of zurkhaneh—one where strength is measured not in domination, but in the courage to feel, to remember, and to resist.

“I never entered a zurkhaneh,” she says. “But I grew up with its tools. And through this work, I realised I’ve carried its spirit all along.”