+2 Gallery is pleased to present a group presentation of works. The Paris Asian art fair strives to be "an ideal platform for dialogue and interaction dedicated to contemporary artistic creation... through a Curatorial Platform and Special Projects."

Kamran Diba is an Iranian Artist; he is a permanent resident of Spain. He divides life between Paris and Malaga. He was born on March 5th, 1937 in Tehran and is an Iranian citizen living in Europe & USA since 1977. Diba started painting in 1959 in the United States and cites Abstract Expressionism as influencing his early paintings.

In Iran his first show was an installation and audio- visual work called” Prodigal Waterman” circa 1966 at Seyhoun Gallery. Zand gallery represented Diba in the seventies. In addition to paintings, in 1974 he made a performance or happening involving the opening night public. Diba, with the collaboration of Parviz Tanavoli, has made memorable public sculptures, which adorn some of his architectural work in Tehran.

He founded, designed, and directed the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in the 70ies and collected one of the richest collections of modern and contemporary art outside western countries. Karim Emami, in the encyclopedia Iranica, refers to him as an art catalyst in Iranian society of the 70s.

Diba was friend with and frequented Iranian Artists Tanavoli, Zenderoudi, Pilaram, Ahmad Aali and Hadjizadeh, and often used his influence to promote their art. He created many outdoor pieces for public spaces, with the collaboration of sculptor Parviz Tanavoli. He also made audio-visual installation in the sixties and introduced performance art to Iran in the mid- seventies.

He was friend of Late Dennis Oppenheim and Keith Haring and has had extensive collection of Jean Michel Basquiat and several works by Keith Haring, Donald Baechler, Franz West and Secundino Hernandez.

Diba was the founding Director of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art 1974-1978. He managed to amass an important collection of Western & Iranian modern and contemporary art for this museum. He has been an active participant in art forums, has written articles and lectured frequently at various venues; to name a few, LACMA Museum of Los Angeles, Prague Museum of art, Quai Branly Museum Paris and Gemaldegalerie (museum)of Berlin and eventually many international art forums and events. He has also been very active online making many virtual appearances -at Iranian and Western sources.

Arash Hanaei (b. 1978. Iran) studied photography at Azad University, Tehran where he focussed on the work produced during the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War. His practice combines mediums and techniques, in addition to amateur photography, to create a ‘vernacular’ of image-making in the tradition of photo documentary. His series Recreational Areas (2008) and Capital (2009) demonstrate the productive interference between digital design and photographic memory. The first explores an ironic perspective on the isolation of individual and the repression of desire, whilst the second is intended as a map of the city of Tehran, questioning the transformation of public space post-war (notably the paradoxical coexistence of frescoes of martyrs and advertising slogans). Hanaei has work has been presented in several solo exhibitions. Hanaei lives and works in Paris, France, and Tehran, Iran.

Sonia Balassanian (b.1942. Armenian - Iranian - American) is a multimedia artist based in New York and Armenia. She holds a BFA from the joint program of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Balassanian has exhibited widely, including MOMA NY and the Armenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007, and is perhaps best known for her work focussed on identity and human rights activism. Her works vary from video arts to installations, drawings, and paintings. Her videos often present an endless chain of suffering, endurance, trauma, and anonymity of the human condition and the infinite cycle of casual, impersonal death. Her drawings and paintings, however, demonstrate a more lyrical side of her work, referencing both the vast landscapes of her Iranian birthplace and her practice as a writer and poet. Balassanian describes them as ‘gestures of writing’, calligraphy of brushwork resembling breeze through fields or streaks of rain, conveying an aura of awe and reverence. These serene works have a kind of inner rhythmic choreography - of latent motion viewed from a quiet, stand-still place of contemplation.

Elham Etemadi is an artist who lives and works in France. In her expressionist figurative paintings, she tries to create a vast and expanded language that is not verbal but visual and is based on human feelings and attentions. Her works are combinations of or her different visions and sides of her character; as a mother, a female immigrant, a wife, and an artist she tries to express her experiences in a visual language that May communicate with as many viewers as possible, from different backgrounds, cultures, nationalities, and genders.

Located in downtown Tehran, Bavan Gallery was established in 2018 by Ava Ayoubi, opening with its first site-specific exhibition titled “Revision at the House on Abdeh St”. After a year of planning, researching, and renovations, the gallery officially opened its doors to the public in December 2019. Bavan Gallery’s artistic vision is based on new experiences in contemporary art and is focused on presenting the evolving landscape in art, stemming from the growing influence of new media. Bavan Gallery aims to be a bridge between the vibrant Iranian contemporary art scene, and international art institutions and markets. In addition to exhibitions, Bavan Gallery hopes to help the critical discourse and create a platform for dialogue in the Iranian visual arts community by hosting panels and discussions, workshops, and by publishing relative materials. Bavan Gallery consists of four exhibition spaces: Ground Floor, First Floor, Pool and Basement (-1 space).

This year Etemad Gallery takes part in the Paris Asian Art Fair with four abstract artists who use geometrical approaches as tools of expression. Habib Farajabadi, Maryam Amini, Peyman Shafieezadeh and Morteza Ahmadvand are artists who have challenged the symbolic to the philosophical, spiritual to sociopolitical, aesthetical to deconstructive with their formal methods.

In the past, it was common among sailors on the southern coast of Iran to light a torch in times of danger to seek help. It was called the “light of redemption.” “On that ship there is the light of redemption,” they say of a sinking ship or boat on the same shores today. The artists of the show, as well as their peers, also know that there is redemption after drowning and plunging into deep waters. Instead of awaiting a savior, they seek to swim for salvation, renew their relationship with the turbulent world around them, and redefine themselves by recognizing their relation to the world outside through their connection to technology, nature, and politics; it also defines the relationship of the Iranian human with “the other,” creating some sort of eclectic-accidental identity for them.

The artistic practice presented by these seven artists seems to be the result of the life and experience of a generation born after the Iranian revolution and the war: a tumultuous period in the Middle East, during which even the simplest decision for everyday life is extraordinarily determined by the challenging circumstances outside. Indeed, each artist is a simple, familiar allegory of a generation that, despite their common concerns and anxieties that stem from their sterilized geographic location, the way they treat media, their narrative style, and their perception of reality, are unique and extensive.

Using the most basic means of visual creation, namely pencil and paper, Sara Abbasian tells the story of the unceasing violence of human beings to themselves and their natural environment. Abbasian’s drawings of humans and animals in her “Epidemy” series are tantamount to an ominous prediction, whereas “Cluster Five” accurately outlines those predictions that have come to pass. Similar to a medium, she summons the dead into the world of the living and then portrays them: an irritant, nightmarish image that stuns the viewer into rediscovering their relation to nature, whose lot has been nothing but death and destruction after nursing us for millennia.

The works of Amir-Nasr Kamgooyan represent a state of unity among contrary forms of the universe that “un-define” the border between existence and non-existence, organic and inorganic, sleep and wakefulness, remembrance and oblivion. By taking a close, hard look at tools and plants, he portrays unity in a coincidental manner, placing mechanical people in an asymmetrical symmetry between a multitude of plants, birds, and large/tiny creatures. In continuation of his previous series, these works have taken an intemporal, disembodied path, with no trace of the present, while not belonging to the past or the future.

Sasan Abri is an artist with his heart bent to memories. With his unique photo printing technique and similar to a man on a remote island waiting to be salvaged, he counts the days by scratching on paper, like tally marks on a prison wall, reconstructing events as he remembers them. Recently becoming tragically acquainted with grief, while he has struggled between his own life and death, he recreates old photographs of the deceased in his “A Little While” series, inviting them for a conversation and a last supper in our world.

In Majid Bigleri’s work, hiding visual codes and gradually injecting essential questions into the audience’s mind leads to the blurring of the border between truth and reality. In “Soot, Fog, Soil,” the audience joins the artist in the questioning process: Can one find a real relationship between himself and a dream land in the mind through migration? Or, is possible to wash away the traces of dirt from a land by simply leaving it? Much like his peers, who gather recollections from fragments of events, with his pasting and assemblages made of recycled materials, he examines war, technology, and the bleak fate that discovery of oil has brought upon the Middle East.

Elika Hedayat’s works portray a terrifying image of a dark, certain future that awaits all of us: a promised paradise or hell, a purgatory experienced, or perhaps a present state that one needs not wait for because it is already there. In her surreal, suspended world, there is no answer to this dilemma and in her grotesque imagery, she seeks to find a way out of his inner dystopia by searching for the relation of the body to politics and ideology.

Throughout his career, Arya Tabandehpour has always been seeking to define himself by exploring the disturbed relationship between man, nature, and technology. Using codes and polarizers, he considers the dominance of machines over all aspects of human life. In another part of the work and using an interactive apparatus, he examines the eternal relationship between human’s return to nature and how nature regenerates humans. He may not find a definite answers to his questions; nonetheless, he realizes that man, for whom technology now used as a narcotic to ease the pain, can find the only remedy in nature.

Similar to a psychoanalyst, and, at the same time, a neuroscientist, Ali Phi explores memories and the contents of his mind as he pours his inner vibrancy into the container of abstract images. Like the other five artists, he constantly questions reality, experiences, and memories. The relationship between changing habitats, its impact on the human mind and soul, and the formation of new memories in relation to that change, are depicted in visual codes that act like an electroencephalograph.

This project is a convergence of questions, without intending to offer definite answers. It is a way of confronting and dealing with dilemmas. The seven artists and their shipwrecked peers have all reached a remote islands, on which sitting around, waiting for a rescue ship, or even gathering food to survive makes no sense. They seek refuge in the isolation of their studios with neither optimism nor pessimism, and, as they create their art, they seek profound peace, and perhaps eternal redemption, before drowning!

SARADIPOUR Art Gallery is pleased to present a group show by three contemporary Iranian artists: Ali Zakeri, Abbas Nasle Shamloo, and Moslem Khezri. While each artist’s work represents a different variety of approaches towards the objective world, they are arguably some of the best components of Iranian figurative art in their ability to transcend the mere mimesis of familiar spaces and objects. Each in their own way, they are dealing with themes rooted in their life experiences and the environments they are intimately familiar with.

Ali Zakeri (1959) – who had his own brush with violence as a young soldier on the battlefield – has painted symbolic pictures of boxers fighting in a bare, vast, and dark arena. Rendered in bright, visceral colors, and bold, expressive brushwork, each scene delivers a raw sense of violence and pain.

Moslem Khezri (1984), who has also been an art teacher, offers intimate, nostalgic images of young boys confined to classrooms under the poetic but pale autumnal sunlight.

Abbas Nasle Shamloo’s (1981) deceptively realistic landscapes, on the other hand, are in fact many-layered imagined vistas inspired by the green-grey and moist nature of northern Iran that has become his new home in the past few years. Coming from a region deeply affected by drought, Abbas has been both interested in and concerned about the environment and humanity’s increasingly destructive and pathological alienation from mother nature

• Tamineh Monsavi: Galerie Félix Frachon

• Hoda Kashiha: Galerie Nathalie Obadia

• Nastaran Shahbazi: Galerie LJ

• Mohammed Banissi: HdM Gallery

• Golnaz Payani: Praz Delavallade

• Farhad Moshiri: PERROTIN

• Azadeh Bagheri, Ilgar Rahimi, Masoud Keshmiri, Parastoo Ahovan, Yazdan Saadi, Sepand Danesh: Galerie Nouchine Pahlevan

Variations on the Unexpected Theme

Presenting 4 Iranian audio artists that explore sound through their unique composition curated by Tatiana Gecmen Waldeck.

Music was banned in 1979 during the Revolution in Iran but made its way back into culture and politics quite swiftly for state propaganda during the Iran–Iraq war. Over time music provided an important political space where artists and audiences could engage in social and political debate. Now, more than forty years on, both the post-revolution children and their music have come of age. The artists’ selection is an acoustical bouquet reflecting this creative youth. From contemporary classic to electro experimental compositions, they shed a bright light on Iran’s sonic future, identity, and the quest for emancipation.

Audio artists will continue to provide an opening to such a diversity of prodigious styles for listeners to unify into communion and contemplation.

1st audio track: 9T Antiope

2nd audio track: FARZANÉ

4th audio track: AMIN SHARIFI