Artissima 2019

Majid Biglari
November 01  —  November 03, 2019
Art Fair

In its first participation in Artissima, Mohsen Gallery is presenting Majid Biglari in a solo booth in Dialogue section of Artissima 2019. The art fair runs from November 1 to 3, 2019.

Tehran-based sculptor, Majid Biglari, has rewritten the remnants of personal and collective memories into collage-like pieces in three separate narratives of his “Mourning” series. In the “Landscape” pieces, he reinterprets and reconstructs images from personal recollections and collective events, expressed in the language of fading color in a hierarchical fashion. In contrast to the abstract form and content of the “Landscape” pieces, the “From a Few Hours to a Few Days Later” watercolor paintings takes an expressionist look at urban ruins and decaying landscapes. Finally, the most naked piece of this trilogy, “The Black Flag,” is a solid, rusty metal piece, spread out on the ground. These three pieces, presented as the “Mourning” series, is like a trilogy that represent common stories from the perspective of three narrators, three eyewitnesses, or three directors in the form of monuments. The artist has transformed various versions of memories from the past into a single narrative, so that it can be read as some sort of “symbolic prototypes.” An individual, biologic body has turned into a collective, artistic body. The pieces of the “Mourning” series have a reductionist, encoded take on external realities as Biglari has employed a universal language to perceive them.

These monuments contain significant components of synecdochic events and the necessity of preserving them from being forgotten or misinterpreted has taxidermized them in an abstract form. However, as time passes and the intensity of the events subside, their initial glory or shock is reduced and normalized.

Moreover, reflecting on materials and components that make the “Mourning” series, we can see that these remnants of “the past” are unfinished and “the now” is unable to complete them. Such a reflection of narrative inability can also be found in Biglari’s other works, such as “Testimony,” “Regarding the Pain of Others,” and “The Experience of Dishevelment.” Once events, memories, and names are destroyed, they are unable to communicate: they only carry meanings in form of monuments with symbolic significance.

Series