Ab-Anbar Gallery - Booth A106
Arash Hanaei, Fire! Fireworks, Diasec digital print,146.67 x 100 cm, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Ab-Anbar Gallery
AB-ANBAR is pleased to announce its participation at Asia Now art fair, Paris, and the fair’s focus on Iranian art this year. The presentation features the works of two contemporary artists from the gallery programme; Sonia Balassanian and Arash Hanaei. Founded in 2014, AB-ANBAR promotes internationally important works by artists from Iran and other latitudes.
In the fancy bubble of marble rooms and Baroque splendour of the fair, the artists, Arash Hanaei and Sonia Balassaninan have come together to create an enclosed world, an ominous fantasy that brings together the social urban life of cities and atrocities of war to speak of a world we may live in today. At entry, the room is filled by a portentous silence that later breaks by peculiar yet familiar noises: the sound of a drone, bleating of lambs and the whispering of a voice in the background, sharing an intimate experience of horror and terror.
Contrary to our auditory perception, the arrangement of the room suggests a suspicious state of peacefulness and quiet. In the main room, we are confronted by a combination of four paintings by Balassanian and three photographs by Hanaei. The paintings present mystical compositions that convey an aura of stand-still quiet and a feeling of awe and reverence. Endlessly repeating brush strokes have created abstract, rhythmic compositions that are representations of repetitive gestures of writing. The repetition reads like a remedial act to heal ostensible, yet disciplined, moments of rupture. The results are rather perfect: perfectly regimented frames made of recurring imperfections - an extinguished state of turmoil we see in Hanaei’s works as well.
As Alexandre Colliex has profoundly described them, Hanaei’s photographs “possess the unheimlich quality of silence. They give themselves away as purely digital images, yet their process is highly deceptive. Contrary to our initial intuition, the artist has not built up images through the computer-assisted addition of pixels. These images are actually the end-result of a painstaking process of attrition. The artist has obtained this digital texture out of genuine photographs of the city from which he has painstakingly removed all the vibrations of life, the details and minute imperfections of the real. The photographer-turned-cosmetic-surgeon has erased the imperfections of the real to reach the smooth ideal of the digital age.
The fireworks which seem congealed against the sheer black sky are not computer-generated, they are the burnt powder detonations of Bastille Day in the banlieue which Arash photographed. Not a single silhouette is to be seen in the apartment building and not a blade of grass on the football field in front. This festive summer night and celebrations have reached a smooth digital perfection. They point to the void of our increasingly digital lives of on-line orders and computerized entertainment with lives devoid of face-to-face interactions. The suburbs have been cleaned of asperity – and human beings. They have been turned into decors to download. this series seeks to translate the city’s noise into a series of flattened surfaces, each emphasising the uncanny alienation that resonates at the core of both the urban environment, and the photographic image itself.“(1)
Concurrently, in the next room, five golden lamb heads complement the eerie quietness of the previous works. This is The Flock, a mixed media installation by Balassanian. The 5 glittering bronze casts of heads of sacrificed lambs are accompanied by a small screen video projection. It continuously shows moving and mooing herds of cattle and flocks of lamb. The work symbolizes warship and sacrifice, as well as sense of helplessness. Parallels can be drawn with a version of the Greek mythology of the “Golden Lamb”, which symbolizes woe, heartache, and murderous vengeance, exerted by “mindless” leaders, while the flocks obediently follow and submit to destiny.
The mooing noise intermingles with the humming of a drone scraping the sides of a cave in Hanaei’s video next door. Lost in an eclipsed space and an obscured time, the uncanny and helpless state of the drone resembles the impotent position of the flock; a provocative likeness that unites the ancient world with the digital age to speak of an unceasing quest for liberation.
Citations: 1* Alexandre Colliex, An Archaeological Study of a Star.