Abbas Akhavan

Last updated

Abbas Akhavan is a Montreal-based visual artist. [1] His recent work consists of site-specific installations, sculpture, video, and performance, consistently in response to the environment in which the work is created. [1] Akhavan was born in Tehran, Iran in 1977. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 2004 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia in 2006. [1] Akhavan's family immigrated to Canada from Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. [2] His work has gained international acclaim, exhibiting in museums, galleries and biennales all over North America, Europe and the Middle East. [3] He is the recipient of the Kunstpreis Berlin (2012), [1] the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014), [4] and the Sobey Art Award (2015). [5]

Contents

Career

Domestic spaces, as negotiated between hospitality and hostility, have been an ongoing area of research in Akhavan's practice. [6] His works are created in direct response to the situation he finds himself working in, whether that might be a specific structure, institution, geographic region, or community. His recent work has moved past the confines of home to the surrounding areas, including an examination of domesticated landscapes. [1] Akhavan has exhibited work at the Western Front in Vancouver, [7] the Delfina Foundation in London, [8] the Bergen Museum in Norway, and ABC Art Berlin Contemporary. Kathleen Ritter writes about his site-specific audio project Landscape: for the birds at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2009: "an extension of Akhavan's previous projects, where he has, for example, placed a pile of shoes at the foot of a gallery's door, hung a white sheet from a gallery's window, planted a live wall of hedges inside a gallery and blocked off a gallery's entrance with a wall of sandbags resembling a military blockade. The installations reinterpret the gallery entrance as a site of special significance, drawing attention to the threshold between expected and unexpected sites of cultural activity." [9] "Akhavan's art is a thoughtful, and at times mournful, interrogation of our habits of perception, underscoring the provisional nature of our understanding of the world around us." [10]

Awards and honours

Akhavan was awarded the Kunstpreis Berlin in 2012 [1] and the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2014. [4] In 2015, Akhavan won the $50,000 Sobey Art Award, given to an artist under 40 whose work has been displayed in a public or commercial art gallery. [5] The Sobey Art Award's six-member curatorial panel said in a statement that they "wanted to underline the generosity and empathy at play in Abbas's work", and that "through a fugitive practice that resists fixed meaning, Akhavan reasserts that power and engagement are always relevant subjects for examination." [2]

Residencies

Exhibitions

Related Research Articles

Germaine Koh is a Malaysian-born and Canadian conceptual artist based in Vancouver. Her works incorporate the artistic styles of neo-conceptual art, minimalism, and environmental art, and is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Belmore</span> Anishinaabekwe artist

Rebecca Belmore D.F.A. is an interdisciplinary Anishinaabekwe artist who is notable for politically conscious and socially aware performance and installation work. She is Ojibwe and member of Obishikokaang. Belmore currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Shary Boyle D.F.A. is a contemporary Canadian visual artist working in the mediums of sculpture, drawing, painting and performance art. She lives and works in Toronto.

Althea Thauberger is a Canadian visual artist, film maker and educator. Her work engages relational practices rooted in sustained collaborations with groups or communities through social, theatrical and textual processes that often operate outside the studio/gallery environment. Her varied research-centric projects have taken her to military base, remote societies and institutional spaces that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings and books, and involve provocative reflections of social, political, institutional and aesthetic power relations. Her recent projects involve an extended engagement with the sites of their production in order to trace broader social and ideological histories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jon Rafman</span> Canadian artist, filmmaker, and essayist

Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work centers around the emotional, social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life. His artwork has gained international attention and was exhibited in 2015 at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View in his online artwork 9-Eyes (2009-ongoing).

Marina Roy is a visual artist, educator and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Judy Radul is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, writer and educator. She is known for her performance art and media installations, as well as her critical writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iman Issa</span> Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist (born 1979)

Iman Issa is an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist whose work looks at the power of display in relation to academic and cultural institutions at large.

Randy Lee Cutler is a writer, academic, educator and artist working in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a PhD in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art. She currently works as a Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in the Faculty of Art.

Duane Linklater is an artist of Omaskêko Cree ancestry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeneen Frei Njootli</span>

Jeneen Frei Njootli is an interdisciplinary Vuntut Gwitchin artist known primarily for their work with sound and textiles, performance, fashion, workshops, and barbeques.

Jordan Bennett is a multi-disciplinary artist of Mi'kmaq descent from Stephenville Crossing, Newfoundland, also known as Ktaqamkuk. He is married to Métis visual artist Amy Malbeuf.

Allison Hrabluik is a visual artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her practice primarily involves video, experimental film and animation. Her practice is informed by literature, narrative, and storytelling and she often utilizes traditional mediums such as collage, sculpture, and print media.

Karen Tam is a Canadian artist and curator who focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities through installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. She is based in Montreal, Quebec.

Jeremy Shaw is a Canadian visual artist based in Berlin, Germany.

Anne Low is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Montreal, Canada. She uses sculpture, installation, textiles and printmaking to explore the relationship of historical contexts of contemporary functional objects and themes that occur, such as the domestic and the decorative. Her works highly focus on the physicality of an object and utilize her historic knowledge of weaving and various methodologies.

Zadie Xa is a Korean-Canadian visual artist who combines sculpture, painting, light, sound, and performance to create immersive multi-media experiences. Drawing inspiration from fields such as ecology, science fiction, and ancient religions, her work explores how beings imagine and inhabit their worlds. Her work is centered on otherness and is informed by personal experience within the Korean diaspora, as well as by environmental and cultural contexts of the Pacific Northwest.

Maggie Groat is an artist and educator who lives in Canada. She received her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Guelph in 2010. Groat has taught at the University of Guelph, University of Toronto, and at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she was the Audain Artist Scholar in Residence in 2014.

Aleesa Cohene is a Canadian visual artist based in Los Angeles.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani is an Iranian-born Canadian multidisciplinary artist and curator who lives and works between London and Toronto.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Abbas Akhavan". Canadian Art. Archived from the original on 18 January 2016. Retrieved 19 January 2016.
  2. 1 2 Adams, James (2015-10-28). "Toronto-based artist Abbas Akhavan awarded 2015 Sobey Art Award". The Globe and Mail. the Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2016-01-22.
  3. ↑ Whyte, Murray (2015-09-10). "Artist's bronze casts of plant samples from Tigris River valley suggest merciless churn of history". The Toronto Star. ISSN   0319-0781 . Retrieved 2016-01-22.
  4. 1 2 "Abbas Akhavan Wins Dubai's Abraaj Group Art Prize – Canadian Art". Canadian Art. Retrieved 2016-01-22.
  5. 1 2 2015 Sobey Art Award. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. 2015. pp. 35–44. ISBN   978-1-55457-673-9.
  6. 1 2 "Mercer Union | Abbas Akhavan: variations on a garden". www.mercerunion.org. Retrieved 2016-01-19.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 "Ontario – Abbas Akhavan". www.cbc.ca. Retrieved 2016-01-22.
  8. 1 2 "Delfina Foundation — Exhibition: Abbas Akhavan". delfinafoundation.com. Retrieved 2016-01-22.
  9. ↑ Ritters, Kathleen (2009). How Soon Is Now. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery. pp. 27–28. ISBN   978-1-895442-74-8.
  10. ↑ "Abbas Akhavan: Sobey Finalist Slideshow – Canadian Art". Canadian Art. Retrieved 2016-01-22.
  11. ↑ Life, Kayhan (2022-05-31). "Artist Abbas Akhavan Opens His First Exhibition in Scotland, 'Study For a Garden'". KAYHAN LIFE. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  12. ↑ "Nearly 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, an artist revisits the looting of the national museum in Baghdad". The Art Newspaper - International art news and events. 2022-06-16. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  13. ↑ Williamson, Beth (2022-09-27). "Abbas Akhavan". Sculpture. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  14. ↑ "Abbas Akhavan: curtain call, variations on a folly - Announcements - e-flux". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  15. ↑ Frankel, Eddy. "Review: Abbas Akhavan at Chisendale Gallery". Time Out London. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  16. ↑ Cumming, Laura (2021-08-22). "Abbas Akhavan review – a poetic monument to folly". The Observer. ISSN   0029-7712 . Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  17. ↑ McFadden, Kegan. "Abbas Akhavan". Canadian Art. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  18. ↑ "Abbas Akhavan "variations on a landscape" at The Power Plant, Toronto — Mousse Magazine and Publishing". www.moussemagazine.it. 2018-12-07. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  19. 1 2 "Exhibition in London: Abbas Akhavan's "Study for a Garden"". www.payvand.com. Retrieved 2016-01-22.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.