Mohsen Gallery is representing two young, talented artists, Sara Abbasian and Majid Biglari in Art Dubai 2018. Sara Abbasian is one of the best drawing artists of her generation, and Majid Biglari, whose sculptures and installations in the past two years promise, the emergence of an artist of considerable talent in the fine art market. The two artists started to collaborate for Art Dubai 2018 by focusing on themes of violence, war, and what they leave behind. On the one hand, both artists were born during the years of Iran-Iraq war and spent their childhood years with the dread of war and the difficulties of the post-war years. On the other hand, they experienced their adolescent years during the “cold war” between Iran and the USA, and the devastations in the neighboring countries. Thus, even though war is a recurring theme, these works reflect the subjective experience of two reserved, introverted artists, whose lives reflect the dread, frustration, and anxiety of a generation of young people in the region; the ones whose lives and fates have been seriously undermined by war and violence from the moment they were born.
In his recent works, Majid Biglari focuses on forms and objects that seem to be the remains of documents and objects that used to indicate historical disasters. However, these objects have been torn apart over time, no longer bearing the traces of the facts they used to convey within their original contexts: now they are all hollowed-out, raw, scattered, with particular significance.
Ruins are the fragments that have become beautiful through repetition or absence and, with the passage of time, they shall become evidences for corrupted parts of history. The real witness is the piece that seems to have never existed, like the reality that has never been depicted, and the truth that has never been uttered.
Focusing on conflict, Sara Abbasian creates drawings to address the deepest causes of war: historic antagonism, economic despair, social injustice. She encourages us to consider their immediate and long-term impacts. From her brushes arise grotesque animals and disturbed people who have faced the most traumatic instance that human beings can endure, namely war: a furnace out of which most of the miseries and virtues of man emerge. Through her works, she has expressed her views on war and the role of nations and individual in them. The main idea behind these series are violence, war, carnage, and massacre. These are but a few startling examples of weirdly creative, truly frightening, and ultimately potent ways in which human beings use weapons of war, terror, and torture. Armed conflict has numerous negative impacts on cities, infrastructures, public health provision, and social order.
Abbasian and Biglari impel us to look at these indirect consequences that are often overlooked.