We are honored to invite curator and artist Rachel Hakimian Emenaker for a conversation with Haniko Zahra, one of the featured artists in our current exhibition Thorns In Your Side. The event is free and open to the public. RSVP through our website at houseofcohit.com/appointments or via email at info@houseofcohit.com. Rachel Hakimian Emenaker is a Los Angeles-based artist, curator, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, textiles, sound, and installation. Her work explores memory, hierarchy, and cultural hybridity through materials rooted in both Eastern and Western traditions. She holds an MFA from UCLA (2024), and has recently presented solo exhibitions at Luce Gallery in Italy and Grand Central Arts Center in Santa Ana. In addition to her studio practice, she has curated exhibitions centered on diasporic narratives and feminist perspectives, including the 2022 UCLA New Wight Biennial. Her approach as a moderator brings a thoughtful, materially grounded perspective to conversations around identity, inheritance, and artistic process. Haniko Zahra, born in Tehran in 1989 and based in Los Angeles, is a contemporary painter whose work explores the intersections of identity, memory, and the human condition. Her emotionally resonant paintings blend radical figuration and symbolic abstraction, drawing from daily life, literature, and personal experience. Zahra describes her works as “mirrors” reflecting the contradictions of modern existence—each painting a narrative space populated by surreal figures navigating intimacy, social pressure, humor, and mortality. She received her MFA in Painting from UCLA in 2024, and her work has been recognized for its conceptual depth and critical engagement with femininity, history, and the future. Thorns In Your Side on view July 11–August 11, 2025 By appointment only