Please join us for the closing reception on Saturday from 4-6pm at our Downtown LA gallery in the Bendix Building. Valence is open today and tomorrow from 11am-5pm, and Saturday from 11am-6pm. Azadeh Shladovsky is a Los Angeles-based artist born in Iran and raised between Los Angeles and Spain. Her practice investigates visual consciousness and the social construction of visibility through what she terms “haptic dialogue”—conversations that emerge at the sensory intersection of materials. Her formative experience as an Iranian forced to assimilate within Western cultural systems revealed the contingent nature of visibility and how cultural identities are mediated through dominant power structures. This understanding deepened profoundly when her daughter’s loss of eyesight fractured her own perception of reality, driving her investigation of how vision operates beyond the individual. Her work engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception, exploring how tactile experience is fundamental to visual understanding. This theoretical foundation has guided her practice’s evolution across multiple media including functional art, film, sculpture and installation. Each medium has deepened her understanding of how different sensory approaches reveal or conceal meaning. Central to her practice is the transformation of archival materials—vintage artifacts, brailled texts, media and educational materials—into new substrates that demand multi-sensory engagement. Her work creates “moments of sensory friction” that generate new forms of meaning while interrupting broader “cycles of organized blindness” by making visible the systems that create invisibility. To further her social practice, she launched The Slit last year, an artist-run programming space that fosters new ways of seeing and understanding through artistic expression. Shladovsky’s interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, functional art, and film.