In a new exhibition in Tehran, Ab/Anbar gallery is examining the role of architecture in defining public and private space.“Mass Individualism: A Form of Multitude” features the work of nine artists and architects with roots in Iran. The artists in the show, who work in mediums ranging from sculpture to drawing to experimental design, explore and interrogate conceptions of public space.According to the gallery’s website, the exhibition seeks to examine the “shifts occurring between public and private space through artworks that explore architecture’s role in facilitating such transformation” and to comment upon “the increasing difficulties individuals are faced with in identifying and perceiving their relationship to each other and to collective (often invisible) social form.”While all the works in the exhibition are grounded in these thematic conceits, curator Azadeh Zaferani has chosen to divide the exhibition into four sections, each of which approaches the themes in a different way.“Public, action, and speech,” which features Siah Armajani’s renderings of imagined tombs for notable public intellectuals as well as his drawings based around Avish Khebrehzadeh’s Surrealist mixed-media project “Edgar + Theater III,” considers the importance of the human voice as an intervention in space.In “multitude and mass ornamentalism,” American-born sculptor and conceptual artist Babak Golkar offers two apparently simple sculptures that explore ideas of urbanism and critique systematic oppressions.The latter sections of the exhibition consider changes wrought upon society by emerging technology and new conceptions of urbanism. In “technological revolution,” sculptor and illustrator Timo Nasseri and frequent collaborators Shahab Fotouhi and Arash Mozafari are on display. Visitors to the show will see how Nasseri and the Fotoughi-Mozafari team apply modern techniques of mass production to classical Middle Eastern artistic traditions like muqarnas—decorative honeycomb-like vaults popular in classical Islamic architectures.“Interior urbanism” presents works including Y.Z Kami’s portraits painted on a disintegrating brick wall and Newsha Tavakolian’s installation “The look,” which imagines new living solutions for an increasingly populous world.“Mass Individualism: A Form of Multitude” runs April 15-May 20 at Ab/Anbar gallery in Tehran.
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