Group Presentation : The Armory Show 2025
At the Armory Show 2025, Dastan presents works by Nicky Nodjoumi (b. 1942), Pooya Aryanpour (b. 1971), Iman Raad (b. 1979), and Mahsa Merci (b. 1990). The presentation reflects on repetition and the lingering unease that arises from cycles of return and recurrence.
Iman Raad’s works feature faces shown in repeated sequences. This repetition creates a mix of familiarity and unease, suggesting that beauty can also carry a sense of disturbance when forms return with unsettling persistence. Nicky Nodjoumi reflects on power, history, and the repetition of human conflicts. His works present fragmented yet insistent imagery, recalling cycles of authority and resistance, and creating an atmosphere of quiet but unrelenting disquiet. Mahsa Merci engages with portraiture through dense, impasto-like oil touches, where repetition lies in the very technique of layering paint. Her figures emerge with a deliberately uneven surface, their skin marked by an unsettling texture that resists smoothness. Often depicted in makeup or drag, they seem to move beyond conventional ideals of beauty, evoking instead a charged atmosphere. Pooya Aryanpour’s sculptural work introduces a spatial dimension to repetition, where reflective surfaces and elongated forms establish an environment of both allure and unease. His approach embodies the psychological weight of recurrence as a formal and emotional condition.
Raad works across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, embroidery, graphic design, and performance lectures. In these diverse works, he draws on influences such as Persian painting, Mughal painting, South-Asian Truck painting. He combines these local references with digital image culture and contemporary subject matter to create his work that ranges from small reverse paintings on glass to mural-scale wall installations. Using a vivid, high key palette, altered perspective, and repetition that mimics digital glitches, results in a riot of color and movement. Traditionally ornamental elements such as birds and flowers and still life subject matters such as fruits and candles are recalibrated into subjects that carry narrative import and are given animate, unnatural presences. These are intertwined with social events and historical moments rendered in fantastical ways to draw in the viewer.
Mehsa Merci (b. 1990 Tehran, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Canada. She obtained her BA in Graphic Design from Tehran University of Art (2009), her MA in Painting from Azad University of Tehran (2014) and MFA from the University of Manitoba in Canada (2019).
