ART CITIES:Dubai-Nazgol Ansarinia

Nazgol Ansarinia examines the systems and networks that underwrite her daily life. Born and raised in Tehran, she dissects, interrogates and recasts everyday objects and events to draw out their relationships to the contemporary Iranian experience. She reveals the inner workings of a social system by taking apart its components before reassembling them to uncover collective assumptions and their underlying rules of engagement.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Green Art Gallery Archive

In the years since the revolution, Iran’s reconstruction has been twofold. The post-1979 economic recovery has resulted in a flurry of new buildings, along with a tidal wave of gentrification and widening income disparity. It is joined by a sustained invocation of nostalgia for the Iranian pastoral, and the ancient Persian civilizations that looks to construct a scaffolding of renewed national identity and pride. In “Surfaces & Solids”, her first solo exhibition in Dubai, the artist considers these recent decades, and how these dual efforts have manifested themselves in Tehran’s urban and socioeconomic fabrics. Ansarinia’s ongoing series “Pillars” takes up this hybrid style, which looks to leave the revolution behind by harkening back to the glorified past of several thousand years ago. A set of columns cast in resin are cross sectioned to reveal economic articles from the Iranian Constitution at their hearts. They speak to the socioeconomic issues that underwrite daily life, even as they symbolically work to buttress both the show and the post-1979 economy. Her recent work, “Fabrications”, meanwhile, takes on the ideological theatre playing out on Tehran building facades, which are commandeered by municipal organizations as canvases for political and social sloganeering. These murals change every few years, and have come to function as a kind of sociopolitical barometer of the country’s mood. As a whole, the works explore how local iterations of a culture might act as a fulcrum and flashpoint for the hopes and fears of people living in an increasingly, albeit asymmetrically, globalized world.

Info: Surfaces & Solids, Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, Dubai, Duration: 16/11/15-9/1/16, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com