Mirmohamad Fatahi | "An-denken (Remembrance)": Dastan's Basement

Dastan is pleased to announce Mirmohammad Fattahi’s solo exhibition titled “An-denken (Remembrance)” at Dastan’s Basement. The exhibition will be open for public viewing from January 26 through February 9, 2018. This is Mirmohammad Fattahi’s first solo exhibition at Dastan’s Basement. His work was previously featured in a Dastan:Outside Project (“Agog”, curated by Aidin Xankeshipour, V-Gallery, November 2016).
Mirmohammad Fattahi (b. 1987, Karaj, Iran) is a graduate of painting from Karaj School of Fine Arts and Soureh University (Tehran). His works frequently deal with death and questions around death. In his works, humans’ relation to objects and the world around, are given the possibility to be delineated based on their relativity to the issue of death.
“An-denken”, which has been created over the course of one year using a wide variety of techniques and materials such as watercolor, acrylic and oil paint, ink and pen, also present themselves as metaphors of death. Mirmohammad Fattahi paints fish, sheep, birds and pigs suspended in being/non-existence, like eternal archetypes, to present an image of ‘original consciousness’ by alluding to death.
Discussing “An-denken”, the artist says: “With death, everything is given meaning to. I paint dead fish or birds to ask about death. Is death the end? Or the end of a possibility? Whatever it is, it is only when everything ends that I can think about the original state. In these works, I have tried to present generic forms instead of creating characters. For me, painting itself has a similar line of inquiry —it is a subject; I think of it as independent of historical trends, thus it has an absolute and everlasting aspect to it.”
Continuing about the exhibition, Mirmohammad Fattahi says: “I have tried to show a gathering of things that seek a cohesive whole and function. The subjects I have chosen can be immediately related to.” Among the subjects in this exhibition, only the chimps are seen to be alive. These are ‘bonobos’, a very social species that are believed to be the closest extant relative to human beings. The bonobos look outside the paintings, a metaphor of death that sees it as an external parameter both in the other works of the exhibition and in general.