Arash Hanaei | "Unblocked Avatars": Basel Social Club 2024
Dastan is pleased to announce its participation in the upcoming edition of Basel Social Club 2024, with a presentation of a video by Arash Hanaei (b. 1978, Tehran, Iran). The event will be open to the public from June 9, through June 16, 2024. This will be Dastan’s second presentation at Basel Social Club.
Artist: Arash Hanaei
Date: 9 – 16 June, 2024
Location: Basel, Switzerland
Address: Mauerstrasse, 4057
Dastan is pleased to announce its participation in the upcoming edition of Basel Social Club 2024, with a presentation of a video by Arash Hanaei (b. 1978, Tehran, Iran). The event will be open to the public from June 9, through June 16, 2024. This will be Dastan’s second presentation at Basel Social Club.
In the video Unblocked Avatars (2022), Hanaei focuses on the famous residential building Ivry-sur-Seinein Paris, designed by French architect Jean Renaudie in the 1970s. Two avatars discuss the necessities, potentials, and requirements of designing the building. The conversation takes place in the metaverse, giving the viewer the impression that it is happening both in the past and in the future. It is as though Ivry’s building is haunted by ghosts from the metaverse and is being studied as an experiment on the possible distributions of space in the future. In recent years, Hanaei has been focusing on the suburbs and margins of cities. Taking inspiration from cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s idea of “hauntology,’ the artist reconstructs the marginal and suburban spaces in the timeless and spaceless world of the metaverse, using the potentials of augmented reality to challenge the utopian ideas of 1970s architecture.
Arash Hanaei is a photographer who, confronting the age of augmented reality, has evolved into an image-maker using a variety of mediums to evaluate the world of shared experience. "Unblocked Avatars" is his response to the utopian geometry of space thought up by architects, city planners, lifestyle coaches, social reformists, philanthropists, and all those whose vision has guided ours over the years. At once eerie, appealing, and satirical, "Unblocked Avatars" was a part of "Suburban Hauntology", a project by Hanaei and curator Morad Montazami, which won the BMW Art Makers award in 2022.
