Artists

Abbas Akhavan

Press release

Commissioner: National Gallery of Canada. Selection committee statement: "The site of an exhibition becomes both a proposal and provocation involving the staging of relations between materials, memory, and place. Akhavan's sculptural environments set the natural world in uneasy balance with the valorization, exploitations, or indeed indifferences of contexts, systems, and projections all too human in origin." Born in Tehran and based between Montreal and Berlin, Abbas Akhavan's multidisciplinary practice reflects on the relationships between place and history, attending to the geopolitical forces which define spaces. Akhavan's practice ranges across site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture, and performance, and the direction of his research has been deeply influenced by the specificity of the sites in which he works.