ANTiPODE is the kind of place that reminds us what an art gallery can be. Founded by Saina Heshmati and Amir Amini, two longtime friends and immigrants from Tehran, the Pioneer Square gallery is built around the idea of art as a bridge between people, places, and lived experiences. Something that can connect us, one piece at a time.
The gallery primarily presents work by immigrant artists, alongside local artists whose practices expand that conversation. Rather than reducing these experiences to a single narrative, Saina and Amir allow each artist and their work to speak with its own complexity. Exhibitions are often joined by artist talks, film screenings, writing workshops, and experimental performances, transforming the gallery into what they aptly describe as an “art home,” a place where artists and audiences can encounter one another with openness and curiosity.
Antipode shares its home with Seattle Jazz Fellowship, bringing visual art and live music together under one roof and creating a space shaped equally by exhibition, performance, and gathering.
We visited ANTiPODE to spend an afternoon with Saina and Amir, learn more about the ideas that brought the gallery into being, and speak with Saina about her own practice and upcoming solo exhibition, opening October 1.
“We are in the business of building bridges, not islands.”
Amir Amini
In Conversation with Saina Heshmati and Amir Amini
How did you each find your way from Tehran to Seattle, and how did your friendship begin?
Amir: Saina and I have known each other from back home. Almost twenty years now. We first met at a place called 'cafe-gallery' in the north of Tehran, near the mountains. Shortly after we met, our partners moved to the US, and we bonded over friendship, jokes, and the traumas of long-distance relationships. We were part of a large group of friends who now live all over the planet, friends we miss so much.
Then I left Tehran to pursue my PhD at UW. A day later, Saina left for Rennes to study Fine Art. In my third year in Seattle, I somehow convinced Saina and her partner, Nik, to move to Seattle. The three of us lived together for seven years, sharing at least one meal every day. We learned how to build a home away from home. In a sense, ANTiPODE is another chapter of the same story.
How did ANTiPODE begin?
Amir: We were working on Postcard from Tehran, sitting at a white circular table inside Oddfellows Café. We chose the name ANTiPODE because we wanted to frame Tehran and Seattle as cultural opposites.
The Postcard from Tehran later became a two-chapter group exhibition at RailSpur. That project was a lot of work, but it ended up being a success beyond our expectations, thanks to the support of RailSpur, local businesses like yours, and our friends in Seattle. It was an amazing event that lasted for two months, but we did so much work and didn’t feel like we harvested all the fruits of it. You see, being able to harvest the fruits of your efforts is something immigrants are sensitive about. For obvious reasons. Anyway, we decided to open our own space: ANTiPODE Art Gallery.
We knew that we wanted to accommodate various art forms and ensure that the presentation of the work meets artists’ standards. So, we designed the gallery with dedicated features for displaying drawings, paintings, posters, poetry, video art, sound installations, sculpture, and other experimental forms. We also share a separate event space with our amazing housemates, Seattle Jazz Fellowship, which allows us to host events while paying less rent.
What does each of you bring to ANTiPODE?
Saina: I’m a full-time artist. Being an artist, you’re always searching for new creative food. Collaborating with other artists, developing new ideas, and building new projects are plankton, and I am a fish. I think my own artistic practice naturally informs what I bring to the gallery and how I approach collaboration.
I am a big fan of process when it comes to curation. I happily dive into understanding an artist’s process, and I search for art that evokes poetry and drawing. Work that is fully baked in an oven of personal emotions, has harmony between content and form, and has a strong foundation in artistic practice is what I am trying to find.
Amir: As a scientist, systematic thinking is the default mode of my productivity-addicted mind. Dissatisfied with unsolved problems, my mind desperately needs to make sense of everything, imposing result-oriented, logical formats on everything around me. It's a powerful approach but when it comes to capturing the delicacy of chaotic and eruptive emotions, it does more harm than good.
As a writer wannabe, I know that these emotional eruptions are my best material for creating something that has the chance of lasting against the corrosion of time, something people freely choose to connect with. ANTiPODE allows me to explore the opposite side of scientific thinking while using some of what I learned in academia and research. Kinda like poetry in that sense.
What do you hope ANTiPODE can contribute to Seattle?
Amir: ANTiPODE exists to use the immigrant experience to create an “art bridge” between Seattle and other cities. We are interested in cities because, unlike countries, cities are tangible. We can hate them, love them, live in them, leave them, and as immigrants, they can live together inside us. We can build these bridges. We have connections to amazing artists all over the world, both well-known and emerging. We want to bring their work across different mediums and add to the Seattle art scene through solo and group exhibitions.
ANTiPODE also exists to use the immigrant experience to transform unfamiliar spaces in Seattle into “art homes,” where artists can present their work and connect with each other and their audiences. We want to be a home for a variety of events. In our first year, between August 2025 and August 2026, we mounted six exhibitions, five solo shows and an anniversary group show featuring all sixteen artists, and twenty-seven events across six strands: film nights, community gatherings, live and experimental music, writing workshops, artist talks, and dance.
“If the exhibitions are the material we build the bridge from, the events are the invitation cards to our art home.”
Amir Amini
Saina, what are you exploring in Seeker, and how has creating it for ANTiPODE shaped the work?
Saina: After a lot of thought, I decided to do a solo exhibition in the space we created because I need to continue my own personal practice alongside running the gallery. ANTiPODE is a lot of work, we are only two people, and it’s not that easy to find a gallery in Seattle.
It also gives me a unique opportunity to be both the artist and the curator of my own exhibition. I know the corners and bricks of the space so I can work in direct relation to the gallery. To be able to think about how the pieces will interact with each other and with the space itself during the process of creation, as opposed to when the work is done, is a beautiful chance.
An arrangement of flowers and everyday objects becomes a still life. The still life becomes a drawing. The drawing alters the space around it. The process becomes still in layered images. Torn pieces stitch to fabric. Drawings, collaged fragments, and torn pieces of paper then move from the wall onto a body. A still artwork becomes a garment, and the garment comes to life through choreography and dance. When the dance ends, the garment returns to the wall, and what was once in motion becomes still again. The only difference is that this still object now carries within it the memory of the body that once moved through it.
Please join us for the opening of Seeker on October 1, featuring dance performances by Cameo Lethem and Maia Melene D’urfé. View the opening details and RSVP.
