Siavash Naghshbandi | ''Exposed'': Dastan's Basement

Dastan is pleased to announce Siavash Naghshbandi’s solo exhibition titled “Exposed” at Dastan’s Basement, curated by Sohrab Kashani. The exhibition will be open for public viewing from March 1 through March 15, 2019.
This is the artist’s first solo exhibition of works at Dastan’s Basement. His previous show with Dastan was "Inevitably Inescapable”, a multimedia installation which was Electric Room’s seventeenth project (December 2017). Siavash Naghshbandi (b. 1987, Tehran Iran) is a visual artist based in Tehran. He graduated in 2008 from IRIB Art University in Tehran with a BA in Animation and has since worked on numerous photography, film editing, and documentary projects. His films have been shown at multiple film festivals including the SEH-TANK: Cinéma Subversif in Zurich; the Middle East Now Film Festival in Florence, and Göteborg Film Festival. His photographs and videos have been included in different exhibitions at various museums, institutions, and art galleries including Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA, Hafriyat Karakoy Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey; Tomin Videothek, Frankfurt, Germany; Hillyer Art Space, Washington D.C, USA; and Affenfaust Galerie, Humburg, Germany.
The current exhibition, which consists of four sections, derives its title (exposed) from the role the media plays in changing our minds and lives. Siavash Naghshbandi believes that due to the fact that we are constantly bombarded with information by the media —a dire truth in today’s world— it seems as if at each moment and at each place, we are being assaulted. Additionally, with communication tools growing deeper into our lives every day, individuals seem to be going into a bottomless solitude to achieve more privacy —thus, perhaps our modern communication tools have in fact confused communication rather than making it easier.
Such disruption in virtual communications, the fact that big data is controlled by computers, the manipulation of data in their paths to reach us, the possibility of being exposed to fake or generated data, the significant changes languages experience due to use of modern communication tools, and the distortion of reality, time, memory and images in today’s world, are some of the themes in the current exhibition. Going through this site-specific installation, the viewer experiences a journey to rethink and reread the impact of media and communication tools on an individual’s life. Siavash Naghshbandi has used his own personal life and communications for observing, modeling, and analyzing this journey.
In one section of the show, an installation of corrupted images, totaling around 300, is presented. Each of these represents a ‘connection’. To create each of these images, the artist has recorded the time of receiving an image from a ‘connection’ on a messaging application and fed it through a random computer algorithm to combine the image with another posted at the exact same time by a news outlet. In another part of the work, the artist has created three-dimensional portraits of five of his friends and combined the moving faces with an approximately nine-minute-long distorted audio loop. The third part includes three nylon layers with holes in some parts, showing a data mapping of the most-used words in his conversations over a messaging application, shown in a large advertisement typeface. Finally, the fourth section shows a live video of Dastan’s Basement, which is being simultaneously distorted using a computer-generated random algorithm.