ART CITIES:Dubai-Nazgol Ansarinia
Nazgol Ansarinia works with different media which include drawings, collages, sculptures, murals and textile works. She uses them to depict daily urban life of Tehran, her hometown. The city itself is changing at a fast pace and has almost fourteen million presidents: this has caused housing issues as there’s an housing shortage while the real estate market is in the middle of a boom and more and more new apartment buildings and shopping malls are built.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Green Art Gallery Archive
Nazgol Ansarinia presents her solo exhibition “Demolishing buildings, buying waste” at Green Art Gallery in Dubai. The artist grows along with a city whose face is rapidly changing. As capitalism’s sway over contemporary Iranian society grows ever more pervasive, there is housing shortage, the real estate market booms, houses make way for towering new apartment buildings and shopping malls, which results in a vicious paradoxical cycle of construction and deconstruction. Ansarinia has said “I have so many layers of memory from each corner of this city. Every part of this city is associated with memories from different stages in my life. I think that’s what makes this fast speed of construction so destructive in a way. It’s taking away our collective memory and individual memory with it. Neighbourhoods are changing so fast that they are unrecognizable. You feel lost when you can’t relate to a space”. By capturing, her daily observations and experiences, Ansarinia tries to get a handle on the innumerable mechanisms of growth that currently define Tehran. She turns urban developments or regulations inside-out, dissects and studies them, to reveal a collective consciousness or feeling in their reconstruction. For her new series “Demolishing buildings, buying waste”, she recorded and analyzed the demolition of a building in Tehran and incorporated the ‘traces’ of the process as video, sculpture and drawings. The video works show a cut-up registration of the building’s demolition by pick-axe and shovel over a period of 16 days. This memento of an everyday home, including a tiled space that must have served as a kitchen until very recently, seems to symbolize all vanishing buildings and the often very recent memories they hold. It also illustrates the notion that for each new building, an equal amount of material must be shoved aside. The rubble that is swept off-screen in the video works on display in the exhibition reappears in a multitude of new sculptural forms. Shattered tiles, bricks, blocks and cement remains are scattered across the floor as naked standard building shapes, stripped of all function and context. They are ordered fragments apparently about to form a disordered whole, or vice versa. The connecting thread that runs through all works in the exhibition can be summed up with Ansarinia’s underlying thought that “I’m a deconstructionist who reconstructs the torn apart elements that show something new about something so banal that has gone unnoticed, so repetitive that it became part of routine life”. This is her way to get a handle on the innumerable mechanisms of growth that currently define this city, and to give them form.
Info: Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, Dubai, Duration: 19/3-28/4/18, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com
