Artists

Arash Nassiri

Press release

For his first institutional solo exhibition, Berlin-based artist Arash Nassiri presents A Bug’s Life, a major new moving-image and sculptural installation. The commission centres on an opulent mansion in Beverly Hills, built in the 1980s by Iranian émigrés. It is one of the last remaining examples of a once-distinctive architectural micro-movement, conceived by architect Hamid Omrani, that emerged in the decades following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Combining local American Modernist proportions with grandiose, French-Rococo-inspired aesthetics, this architectural style was later banned by the city of Los Angeles in 2004.

A Bug’s Life follows its protagonist – a hand-carved wooden puppet in the shape of an insect – who slinks through the palatial home, drawn to its glossy surfaces and gold-tinged décor. Creeping through hallways and lingering in shadowed rooms, the puppet intruder becomes our guide through a private world thick with memory, power, and selective erasure. Along the way, fragments of story surface through glimpses of glossy magazines, an eavesdropped phone call, and snippets of conversations that echo through corridors, drawing the audience into a voyeuristic encounter that reveals how architecture can entrench aspiration, exclusion, and cultural displacement.

Nassiri’s practice draws on the visual languages of music videos, television, and cinema, reworking familiar formats into speculative, allegorical forms. His work investigates how built environments absorb and reflect histories of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity. In A Bug’s Life, Nassiri examines a domestic space suspended between lived reality and distortion, where personal and architectural histories intersect.

Presented at Chisenhale Gallery in a translucent architectural shell, A Bug’s Life is a meditation on the fragile systems through which some histories are kept alive and others are buried. Weaving oral testimonies from the home’s inhabitants with voices from communities further afield, Nassiri asks what our spaces remember long after we have left them, and what traces of social, cultural, and political life linger in their walls.