Visual Dialogues | The Book of Kings | Shirin Neshat & Fereydoun Ave | March 2019
Secret of Words
Mehran Mohajer & Sadegh Tirafkan
November 2006
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Total Arts Gallery at the Courtyard and Massoud Nader Present exhibition of Photography by Sadegh Tirafkan with support of Silk Road Gallery this exhibition is accompanied by photographs of Mehran Mohajer Sadegh Tirafkan is a persevering artist who navigates through time and culture in search of his place and identity as an Iranian man in the contemporary world. The medium of photography has become his main platform to construct powerful visual plays, using a combination of elements that he seasons sufficiently with symbolism.
The significance of symbolism throughout Tirafkan’s body of work comes from his Persian root in which direct dialogue is rarely used, but frequently replaced by symbolic languages. How do you inform a culture that has three thousand years of history, rich in tradition and essentially a homogenous and male dominated society? Tirafkan expresses his concerns through images of numerous self-portraits and portraits of friends. He once said, "I began photography by recording what surrounded me. Now I take what is around me in the studio and make it into what I see through the prism of my life and culture." Tirafkan poses himself and others in the studio time after time to explore the meaning of being a contemporary Iranian. Blending tradition, history and memory, he recreates visually compelling scenes that build visceral connection to his ancient country. And this is where the strength and beauty of Tirafkan's work lie.
In reinventing and revisiting Iranian tradition he is also criticizing and challenging his ancestors' long-standing authority. In spite the highly eloquent appearances; I see two hidden trends in his work, which the artist has perhaps introduced even without realizing it: a theatrical staging of all the historic drama of his country, all the painful events of which he experienced intensely, and a discreet journey towards a spirituality which emanates from his whole vision. Here, Tirafkan surreptitiously rejoins the mystical quest which remains, whether we like it or not, the key-stone of any metaphysical edifice of the Iranian world. Born in Iran in 1965, Tirafkan trained as a photographer at the University of Fine Arts in Tehran. Since the late 1990’s he has participated in numerous solo exhibitions and group shows, in Tehran, Paris and New York.
Tirafkan’s work offers an eloquent meditation on modern Iranian man’s relationship to his past and on his search for a meaningful identity in the present. Identity, history and memory have been central concerns in the work of non-western artists since the era of colonialism. Tirafkan, frequently using himself as a model, revisits and reinvents these themes in his series of enigmatic yet visually compelling photographs. He uses words and symbols to communicate with the audience and
Abstract & Lanscape
Mohseni Kermanshahi
February 2005
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A. Mohseni was born in 1960, in Kermanshah west of Iran. He started painting with Master Rahim Navesi before moving to Tehran. He held his first one-man show in 1994 and has come a long way from his humble beginnings. Landscape, traditional life and nature were always his main subjects to paint and after moving to UAE he found this passion in the local scenery. T
his exhibition would be an exceptional one in Mohseni’s career since he is entering a new period after 10 years of professionally painting landscapes and still life witch is still the close to Mohseni’s heart in a different way. Mohseni has participated in more than 40 solo and group exhibitions in Iran including Tehran Contemporary Art Museum, Australia, Kuwait and the UAE. Mohseni has won a special award from Tehran Contemporary Art Museum as the best Artist of the year in 1996. Mohseni has published 2 books, which are: 1. Nature in the painting of Abdol Hossein Mohseni 2. Painting of Abdol Hossein Mohsenis He is working on two new books at present.
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Reconstructed Landscape, Art Dubai 2025
Fereydoun Ave, Shaqayeq Arabi & Dariush Zandi ​
April 16 - 20th 2025
Negar Azimi
April 2025
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Alongside a wall in Dubai’s Madinat Jumeirah is an unusual site: a jumble of large-scale black-and-white photographs, human debris, and the remains of one fallen tree. The installation, the work of three artists, makes for an improbable presence in the strenuously groomed grounds in which it sits. Walking by, the sight exerts an unmistakable cosmic energy: a call for pause, reflection.
The artists Shaqayeq Arabi, Fereydoun Ave, and Dariush Zandi have been in dialogue for some fifteen years, each of them preoccupied with the swiftly shifting conditions of the Anthropocene: an earth under duress, an earth throttled, pilfered, and abused by rapacious humans. “A tribute to what was and what may soon only be seen in museums and galleries,” is how Ave describes the installation in Dubai.
As it happens, Dubai is a prime staging ground for this experiment in collage. A locale which has become the avatar of the new in the global consciousness—land of unbridled capital, hallucinatory growth—even if, in fact, it has communities and traditions stretching back for centuries, communities which one may be hard pressed to access without a dose of curiosity and effort.
Arabi and Zandi, in their capacity as artist and city planner respectively, and through the workings of their pioneering nonprofit gallery space Courtyard, have long been invested in these lost, vernacular histories. In his work as an architect, Zandi often incorporates local traditions and modes—ancient cooling systems, doors, and more—into his contemporary designs. At the installation at Madinat Jumeirah, his largescale photographscapture an Emirati landscape—desert, rock, mountain—under threat. Meanwhile, Arabi, an inspired scavenger, often surveils the same landscape for traces of what once was. Dried up vegetation she has gathered becomes sculptural as she plants these traces of nature under duress in rusted paint buckets—themselves marked by the sediment of time and the ravages of a warming earth. The pair’s work, it could be said, are monuments to a fading world.
Ave, meanwhile, has long been invested in the question of roots. Where do things come from? How did we become so divorced from our origins and, by extension, the four sacred elements? He knows this dynamic well; in Tehran, where he spends part of the year, the old is routinely wrecked to make way for the new. Borjsazee, or the construction of high-rises, is a ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape with historical buildings, gardens, and nature at large routinely destroyed in the name of progress, industrialization. A process, one might say, that began in the 1960s and only accelerated after the Iranian Revolution.
A fallen tree marks Ave’s participation, a victim of an irregular weather pattern in the form of a violent storm. Said tree has been chopped up, rendered a series of stumps, parts of them painted in splashes of red. The red, inevitably, suggests blood.
Which is to say, theatricality abounds here. Stepping back, Reconstructed Landscape has the energy of a film set, with its intentional lighting, its artifice, its strenuously constructed nature. Here is a film about a future that is increasingly our dark present.