Download Report

GREEN ART GALLERY PRESENTS NAZGOL ANSARINIA AND
KAMROOZ ARAM AT MIART ART FAIR, MILAN, 10 -12 APRIL 2015
Kamrooz Aram, Untitled (Ancient through Modern 9), 2015, mixed media on linen, 51 x 61 cm
For our inaugural participation in miart, held from April 10-12 in Milan, Italy, Green Art Gallery
presents a two-person booth featuring Kamrooz Aram and Nazgol Ansarinia. The booth
investigates the way in which ancient Iranian visual culture is celebrated in the present day.
Ansarinia exhibits three sculptures while Aram exhibits new collages as well as large paintings,
which function as the exhibition design. These large, unstretched linens are painted with
geometric forms that reference Modernist abstraction, as well as the exhibition displays of
encyclopaedic museums. In this particular installation, Aram makes reference to the exhibition
designs of Carlo Scarpa, notable for their ability to tactfully integrate modernist sensibilities
with classical forms.
At base, the booth unpacks the studied neutrality of the museum display, which creates the
historical and cultural distance necessary to frame ancient Persian artworks as artifacts-not-art.
Kamrooz Aram’s series Ancient through Modern constructs collages from mid-century
catalogues and art history books in which these artworks and objects circulate. In their
Modernist-tinged layout and photography, these publications constitute an important part of
the West’s engagement with the Middle East. The images, meanwhile, work to produce a certain
kind of longing for a richer, more glorious time for many Iranians today. By aggrandising the
distant past, these objects feed a collective desire to establish a civilisational genealogy and
create a sense of cultural nostalgia which belies the complicated relationship between nonWestern artworks and the development of Western modernism.
Outside of the rarified spaces of the art world, the urban landscape of Tehran has in recent
years begun to reflect a similar resurfacing of ancient Persia, as mirrored in Nazgol Ansarinia’s
Pillars. While Iran has historically valued a certain kind of interiority and modesty with regards
to the public display of public life, in the decades following the Islamic revolution, a new form
of ostentation arrived. The result is an architectural hybrid that melds Ancient Persian and
Roman motifs, characterised by a prominent use of of columns. Despite this nostalgic external
veneer, the cross-sectional columns of Pillars reveal the text of the Iranian Constitution—
specifically the articles pertaining to ownership and taxation—at their hearts. Even as they
symbolically comment on this aestheticised cultural patrimony, they speak to the very real
socioeconomic issues that govern daily Tehrani life today.
Here, the installation functions as a microcosm of the encyclopedic museum display, an elegy
for the stated objectives of the art fair booth (a site of discovery, a site of acquisition). Taken as
a whole, the booth works as both backdrop and foil to resituate its very Iranian artworks within
the Western modernity they are usually excluded from.
Nazgol Ansarinia (born 1979, Tehran, Iran) will be taking part in the Iranian pavilion at the
2015 Venice Biennale. She also took part in the 10th & 12th Istanbul Biennials, and was a
recipient of the 2009 Abraaj Capital Art Prize. In Summer 2014 Ansarinia was selected as the
first resident at Parasol Unit, London. She lives and works in Tehran.
Select exhibitions include: Solo show at Green Art Gallery, Dubai (upcoming 2015); Iranian
Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015); Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract
Art and Society 1915-2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Longing Persia, Exchange and
reception of art in Persia and Europe in the 17th Century & Contemporary Art from Tehran,
Museum Rietberg, Zurich (2013); Safar/Voyage, The Museum of Anthropology at the University
of British Columbia, Vancouver (2013); When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, CCA
Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2012), and the Museum of Contemporary
Art Detroit, Detroit (2013); A Permanent Record For Future Investigation, Green Art Gallery,
Dubai (2012); Interior Renovations, Tehran, 2010, Green Cardamom, London (2011).
Kamrooz Aram (born 1978, Shiraz) received his MFA from Columbia University in 2003. Aram
is the winner of the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2014; he has also been awarded grants from the
New York Foundation for the Arts (2004) and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program (20012003). His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; M+
Museum, Hong Kong; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; The FLAG Foundation, New York; and
Deutsche Bank Collection among others.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Palimpsest: Unstable Paintings for Anxious
Interiors, Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2014); Kamrooz Aram/Julie Weitz, The Suburban, Chicago
(2013); Brute Ornament: Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah, curated by Murtaza Vali, Green Art
Gallery, Dubai (2012); Negotiations, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York (2011); Generation
After Generation, Revolution after Revelation, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2010); and Kamrooz
Aram: Realms and Reveries, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams
(2006). Select group exhibitions include Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting,
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2014) and Akron Art Museum, Akron (2015); The Elephant in
The Dark, The Devi Art Foundation, Delhi (2012); roundabout, City Gallery Wellington (2010);
the Busan Biennale (2006); P.S.1/MoMA’s Greater New York 2005; and the Prague Biennale I
(2003).
Green Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery based in Dubai, UAE. The gallery represents a
multi-generational mix of contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia,
Turkey, and beyond, working across different media with a research-based approach.
For high-res images, artist bios, press enquiries, artist interviews and any further information
please contact [email protected] or call +971 56 778 5953