Group Presentation | "Parallel Circuit[s]" | 25 April - 21 May 2026

Dastan announces “Parallel Circuit(s)” at 417 N. Camden Drive, a Dastan:Outside pop-up exhibition by Dastan Gallery, in collaboration with Parallel Circuit and François Ghebaly. The exhibition, the first of a series of events by Dastan in Los Angeles, brings together an array of diverse yet distinctive voices from contemporary art, inviting cross-cultural and cross-generational dialog. The exhibition will open on April 25 and continue through May 21, 2026.

In a parallel circuit, each component runs its own loop independently. Nothing is forced through a single path. The system works precisely because its parts do not collapse into one another.

When Mamali Shafahi opened Parallel Circuit in Tehran, the inaugural exhibition was titled “Alternating Currents”. He described it simply: “in a time of bewilderment and isolation, these currents feed the bulb that lights the room”. The space was conceived as a platform for exchange, bringing international artists into dialogue with the local scene and creating a circulation of ideas across borders. From the outset, however, this ambition could only be partially realized. Political conditions, followed by the rupture of COVID, made such exchanges increasingly difficult, leaving the program open, but never fully actualized. It remains the case today.

This incompletion did not mark a failure so much as a redirection. If artists could not be brought into Tehran as intended, the movement had to occur elsewhere. International fairs, already part of the gallery’s program, became one of the circuits through which this logic of exchange could continue beyond its initial geography, creating connections where other routes had been blocked.

The works in this exhibition have been living in Los Angeles. They arrived through the ordinary logistics of a gallery program as well as through LA-based artists: shipped for fairs, for clients, for the ongoing work of keeping things moving across borders that do not always cooperate. Some of that movement has become, for now, one-directional. The path back is not currently open. So the works are here, and so are we, and that is reason enough to open a room and let people in.

The room is at 417 N. Camden Drive, in a 1938 brick building renovated by Johnston Marklee, with a courtyard that Eric Nagelmann — the landscape architect behind Lotus Land and the Sheats Goldstein gardens — designed coming out of semi-retirement. The entrance is through Mameg, Sonia Eram’s boutique, which has been part of Beverly Hills’ cultural life for more than thirty years — a room where art people, fashion people, and the city’s Iranian community have long found each other, shaped by Eram’s curatorial eye as much as by the clothes on the racks. She was there for our first walk-through of the space. Behind it, until earlier this year, was Michael Werner Gallery’s Los Angeles outpost — four exhibitions of serious painting mounted with the stated intention of grafting into LA’s culture rather than arriving to dominate it. Gordon VeneKlasen closed it following the dissolution of a thirty-five-year partnership. We are the first to open something here since.

Dastan has always operated this way — not only from fixed addresses but from borrowed rooms and found spaces that carry their own histories. Since the gallery’s earliest years, this program has been called Dastan:Outside. The exhibition in Beverly Hills is its most recent iteration, presented in the spirit of Parallel Circuit, the Tehran gallery whose logic and lineage it carries.

These are artists whose practices we carry because we believe in them, not as representatives of a place or a moment, but as distinct voices that illuminate one another when they share space. That has always been the logic. It still holds.

This is the first of several endeavors Dastan is working towards in Los Angeles.

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