Abbas Akhavan will signify Canada on the 2026 version of the Venice Biennale, the Nationwide Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the pavilion’s commissioner, introduced on Thursday.
Associated Articles
Canada is likely one of the few nations to announce its consultant for the following Biennale, typically thought of the Olympics of the nation artwork world. At this yr’s Biennale, Canada is represented by Kapwani Kiwanga, the primary Black lady to signify the nation. Different artists who’ve taken on the pavilion embrace Stan Douglas, Isuma, Geoffrey Farmer, David Altmejd, Rebecca Belmore, and Rodney Graham.
With a multidisciplinary follow that spans set up, sculpture, efficiency and video, Akhavan creates work that appears on the histories of particular areas and the variations between the structure of private and non-private areas. In his work, time seems to break down as he typically investigates historic cultural websites which might be below menace, just like the Nationwide Museum of Iraq or Palmyra, and their looting or destruction, typically with an eye fixed to how photos of those locations flow into on-line.
Abbas Akhavan, curtain name, variations on a folly, 2021/2023, set up view, at Copenhagen Modern.
“The Nationwide Gallery of Canada is uniquely positioned to deliver collectively artists, artwork establishments, and cultural organizations from throughout the nation to have fun Canadian expertise on the worldwide stage and facilitate connections within the artwork world,” Jean-François Bélisle, the Nationwide Gallery’s director and CEO, mentioned in a press release. “Abbas’ work is formed by the distinctive traits of the websites he works on, together with the architectures, surrounding economies, and people who frequent them.”
Akhavan, who was born in Tehran and now splits his time between Montreal and Berlin, is a frequent presence on the worldwide biennial circuit. His work has featured within the 2014 and 2023 editions of the Gwangju Biennale, the 2014 Montreal Biennale, the 2017 Sharjah Biennial, New Orleans’s Prospect.4 triennial in 2017, the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Artwork. He has additionally appeared in essential museum exhibitions resembling “However a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise,” a survey of up to date artwork from the Center East and North Africa that was held on the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016.
He has additionally been the topic of variety of institutional solo exhibitions, together with at Copenhagen Modern (in 2023), Modern Artwork Gallery, Vancouver (2022), Chisenhale Gallery in London (2021), CCA Wattis Institute for Modern Arts in San San Francisco (2019), and the Energy Plant Modern Artwork Gallery in Toronto (2018). Towards the top of the Biennale’s run, the Walker Artwork Heart in Minneapolis will open a mid-career survey of Akhavan’s work in November 2026.
Abbas Akhavan, variations on a folly, 2022, set up view, at Mount Stuart Home, Isle of Bute, UK.
Picture Keith Hunter
Akhavan was chosen by a six-person committee with experience on the up to date artwork scene in Canada. Its members had been Julie Crooks, curator of arts of worldwide Africa and the diaspora on the Artwork Gallery of Ontario; Léuli Eshrāghi, curator of Indigenous practices on the Montreal Museum of Tremendous Artwork; Crystal Mowry, director of packages on the MacKenzie Artwork Gallery in Regina; Daina Warren, government director of Indigenous Initiatives at Emily Carr College in Vancouver; Pan Wendt, curator of Confederation Centre of the Arts on Prince Edward Island; and Bélisle, who served as chairperson.
In a press release, the choice committee wrote, “The committee was drawn to the interdisciplinary follow of Abbas Akhavan, a meticulous artist and thinker for whom the positioning of an exhibition turns into each a proposal and provocation involving the staging of relations between supplies, reminiscence, and place. Whether or not invoking the ruins of historical statues destroyed throughout geopolitical conflicts or exploring the acknowledged idealism of gardens and different domesticated areas, Akhavan’s sculptural environments set the pure world in uneasy stability with the valorization, exploitations, or certainly indifferences of contexts, techniques, and projections all too human in origin.”