Andisheh Avini | "Everyone Together": +2 [Deh-Vanak]

+2 [Deh-Vanak] is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Andisheh Avini, opening on Friday, February 13. This is the artist’s second exhibition in Tehran.

 

At the center of the exhibition are three vertical spine forms, rendered in marquetry and strategically installed to cast long, shifting shadows across the gallery. Acting as both structure and metaphor, the spine supports the body, connecting mind to movement while evoking resilience and hope as part of a fundamentally human core. Across distance, circumstance, and political conditions, the spines and the intricate marquetry adorning their respective surfaces become a figure for something enduring and inescapable within the human form. The spines are further entwined with glass organs, which cast a luminous glow alongside the spines' shadows. Like Avini’s spines, these organs have a meaning beyond anatomical function, serving as sites for the expression of love and endurance and thereby underscoring the beauty of such vulnerability and resilience in delicate concert.

Flanking the spines are eight marquetry masks installed along the length of the gallery, arranged with deliberate density and restraint. Their placement produces a sense of compression and vigilance, heightening the emotional resonance of the exhibition space. Here, masks expound on the fundamental questions of identity raised by the spines, nodding en masse to the condition of the diaspora: watching, waiting, and bearing witness from afar while acting as mechanisms of concealment. Facing inwards toward the spines, they embody a collective gaze to an anatomical and emotive core.

Materiality plays a crucial role throughout the exhibition. Avini's masterful use of marquetry weaves history and craft into a portrayal of internalized humanity, while glass evokes notions of fragility and exposure. Together, these elements reflect the tightrope many Iranians walk: a simultaneous love for, identification with, and estrangement from, a country that remains deeply formative. Ultimately, regardless of an outward emotive state, these core elements of identity, the beauty and vulnerability they evoke, and the various manners of their outward expression, remain fundamental and inescapable.

Installed with careful precision, (exhibition title?) unfolds as a meditation on identity not as a political position, but as an internal structure—one that persists through melancholy, anger, love, and resilience, with a gaze directed toward a deeply human core.