Manijeh Akhavan | Nooshin Askari | Sadra Bani Asadi Serminaz Barseghian | Aylar Dastgiri | Sam Samiee | Sepide Zamani
NMAG is honored to host a group exhibition curated by Amsterdam- and Tehran-based painter Sam Samiee, who has gathered a group of fellow Iranian artists for the second time after their recent show in Tehran. In the exhibition, their works will form a painting installation where each part comments on one of the others, reflecting shared conversations, concerns and observations. Join us Wednesday, November 22rd for the exhibition opening in the presence of Sam Samiee, Aylar Dastgiri and Nooshin Askari. Prior to the exhibition opening, it is possible to attend an artist talk on Tuesday, November 21st at 11 AM.
A CAMP introduces the work of seven young Iranian painters who have influenced each other’s practices over the past decade during their time at Tehran University of the Arts, the studios of Seroj Barseghian and Pantea Rahmani and beyond. Aside from providing an introduction to their work, the exhibition stages an experiment in artistic methodology on the very basis of the mutual influences between the artists. Rather than the exhibited works and the artists themselves, it is the relationality between them which forms the fabric of the exhibition.
Following a Copernican worldview, the participants in A CAMP do not put themselves at the center ––as in individualist understanding––, but instead show how they are kept in their own place only by something or someone Other, acting on them like gravity, forming them to give shape and substance. The exhibition therefore does not present its participating artists as a group of separate subjects, but instead draws attention to the ways in which their own self is always already filled with echoes of each other. Thus, every artist takes a “cartographical” approach to scrutinize how their respective locations only exist in reference to other positions occupied on the same map by the other participants in the show.
The finished painting installation which constitutes the core of the exhibition results out of the overlap and juxtaposition of each of these cartographical explorations. Its final form only emerged while working through the connections between the artworks in situ, leaving the exact content and meaning of the exhibition suspended in a permanent state of becoming that never reaches a point of static being. As such, the exhibition urges those confronted with it to abandon the search for complete explanations or a pre-determined course of action to instead step into the openness of a map that extends on and on without ever fully capturing all that is.
Photo credits: Chun-Han Chiang