Group presentation: ART021 2021

Dastan is pleased to announce its third participation at ART021 with a presentation of works by Farrokh Mahdavi, Ghasemi Brothers, Hoda Kashiha, Kiarash Alimi, Sam Samiee and Sina Ghadaksaz.

Farrokh Mahdavi (b. 1970, Tehran, Iran) is amongst the cutting edge painters of his generation in Iran, with his work being shown in over thirty exhibitions in Iran and abroad. Farrokh's works are easily distinguished with their unique pink hue and recognizable technique. As he once said about his portraits, Farrokh aims to reach “a more material meaning” by “omitting the impurities”, de familiarization of known facial elements, and crossing over “cliché definitions”. Farrokh Mahdavi's work has been presented at the Iranian Pavilion in Venice Biennale.

Ghasemi Brothers, a collective that includes Morteza, Sina and Mojtaba Ghasemi Sheelsar have been working together since 2015. Each one of them works as a painter individually but when part of the collective, they work together on a single piece. Their collaborative work has been featured in “Red Room” (Dastan’s Basement, July 2016), “Red Room 2: Migratory Birds” curated by Roya Khadjavi (Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York, April 2017) and “Blue Room” at V-Gallery (A Dastan:Outside Project) in 2018. The trio work freely and without thematic or technique-related limits, giving them a lot of freedom in expressiveness. Such an approach has caused them to be able to continue working together. In the beginning they worked to create a single discourse based around the themes and interests that they share. Following these steps and driven by intuition, Ghasemi Brothers gradually started to paint objects that were reminiscent of their native city, the coastal area of Bandar Anzali, and its natural elements including the Caspian Sea, rain, and the color blue.

Hoda Kashiha (b. 1986, Tehran, Iran) is a graduate of painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran (BA, 2009), and Boston University (MFA, 2014). Her work has been featured in five solo exhibitions in Iran and one in the United States, as well as numerous international group shows. She has received awards such as the Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Award, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Rare Book Prize, Iranian Association of Boston Scholarship, and Boston University Women’s Council Scholarship. She was a fellow at MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for creative art and she received the John Mitchel Foundation Grant at Vermont Studio Center.

Currently living and working in Tehran, Kiarash Alimi (b. 1985, Tehran) is a visual artist, writer, and the former editor in chief of Zamineh, a free online visual arts magazine. Kiarash Alimi studied painting at Tehran School of Visual Arts. His paintings reveal an extreme reduction of form, a fluid handling of color, and a profound self-reflective approach that foregrounds his explorations in painting as “a mental activity” and “thinking through doing”. In his paintings, Alimi employs blocks of color, blurred at the edges and afloat in the space. His swatches, color experiments and gradients favor intersectionality over delineation, defying rigid identities and restrictive labeling. Tendered with a fluid handling of color, the artist’s visual signifiers turn into a constant self-reflective inquiry, posing questions, not necessarily demanding any specific answer.

Sam Samiee (b. 1988, Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian painter and essayist based in Amsterdam and Tehran. He has recently finished a two-year residency program at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. In his work, Samiee focusses on the practice of painting and research in history or philosophy, Persian literature, the history of painting and psychoanalysis. Characteristic of his work is the break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas. Therefore, most of his work is presented as immersive painterly installations. Sam Samiee does not shy away from the ornamental. His so-called iPad drawings for example, drawn with a simple application, are photocopied and multiplied to form ornamental framings. Within the context of his installations, these patterns move beyond the decorative and reveal a fragmented autonomy.

Sina Ghadaksaz (b. 1992, Tabriz, Iran) is a multimedia artist based in Tabriz. He studied Multimedia Arts at Tabriz University before completing his MFA in Art Studies at Tabriz University in 2018.His artistic practice can be divided into two connected parts: Theory and Practice. The first part includes his activities and projects as an art ethnographer and the second part, which as he believes is the main part, includes the process of painting. Ghadaksaz’s paintings are associated to his anthropology knowledge and he tries to continue his theoretical approaches in them, not with a conceptual form of art but simply by action of painting and making image.