Milad Rostami | "Similarities, Cognations": Dastan's Basement

Dastan presents an exhibition of work by Milad Rostami titled “Similarities, Cognations” at Dastan’s Basement. The exhibition will open on Friday, 18 December, 2020 and will be on display for public viewing until January 1, 2021. His first solo exhibition at Dastan, this presentation features 18 works of mixed-media digital prints on paper and aluminum plates.

Milad Rostami (b. 1985, Tehran) is a visual artist, researcher, writer, and the co-chief editor of Kaarnama art magazine. He studied painting at Sooreh University of Art (Tehran, Iran) and obtained his master’s degree in Art Studies from Payame Noor University (Tehran, Iran). Beginning his artistic practice in 2002, Milad Rostami has been working as a visual artist, lecturer, and researcher in art history and theory.

In “Similarities, Cognations”, Milad Rostami creates images that bring together two seemingly dissimilar forms of architecture, which, according to the artist, have little in common in terms of structural or contextual characteristics; these include modern and contemporary industrial structures such as power plants and oil wells, and ancient religious and ritual sites like temples and shrines. Standing somewhere between painting and digital print, these works have been created using a wide range of natural and industrial materials such as pigments, ash, iron oxide and paint strippers, lending their surface a rusty worn-out impression. Thus, the artist invites the viewers to step out of common, unexamined presuppositions that have, as the he relates, “obliterated our capacity to perceive similarities in visual data emerging from different and even contrasting contexts.”