9 March - 5 May 2019
No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present RECOLLECTION, the first solo exhibition by Majid Biglari in Amsterdam. The in Tehran-based artist is the first artist-in-residence at the gallery’s new location in Bos & Lommer and has been working on a new series on site for the past two months.
RECOLLECTION shows his new series titled Mourning (2019) consisting of sculptures, a photographic installation, paintings and a video, which is the result of the artist’s archival collection of various global events of terror, loss and natural disasters.
Living among the ruins has become an inseparable part of life. The remains are raw, scattered and inconsistent signs of all things that no longer exist. The subdued experience of living in the new world order will not erase these facts from our daily existence, as images, news, and information are readily available to us throughout different media. We find ourselves among the ruins everywhere. The availability of information does not increase awareness or prevents the ruins, but normalizes them, while people continue living in ignorance. Ruins become reduced experiences of humans.
Majid Biglari presents five memorials, objects in which he addresses the absence of their initial traces. What is left is solely their aesthetic formal quality. Memorials, with the accumulation of their bitter memories, are becoming useless, fake bodies; structures that reproduce aestheticized versions of disasters, while they become part of it. When humanity does not take time to mourn, monuments of oblivion are produced one after the other in old and new formats. Numbers lose their expressiveness and return to their formal, abstract nature.
Majid Biglari (Iran, 1986) earned his BA in Sculpture from Tehran University of Art. He has exhibited his work in various solo and group exhibitions in amongst others at TMoCA as part of the 7th Edition of Tehran National Sculpture Biennial, Mohsen Gallery Tehran, Rogue Space New York and No Man’s Art Pop-up Gallery Tehran in 2016. Majid Biglari lives and works in Tehran.
Photos: Neeltje de Vries