Untitled Art Miami 2022: Sina Ghadaksaz & Milad Mousavi

Parallel Circuit presented by Dastan Gallery is showing two new collections by Sina Ghadaksaz and Milad Mousavi at Untitled Art 2022. The Miami Beach art fair will play host to seven paintings of Milad Mousavi, whose main subjects are human figures, and six new works by Sina Ghadaksaz, who continues with the subject of his previous collection (“Sugar in the Basement”, 2022). Dastan sees its participation in this edition of Untitled Art as an opportunity for young Iranian artists to share their lived experiences, especially at this juncture when the country is going through much soul-searching, redefining its relationship to power.

Milad Mousavi is a social observer and responds to what happens in his surroundings. Each of his paintings relates a story that connects it to the larger society. Characters in Mousavi's paintings live in paralysis and uncertainty. Broken individuals (including the artist himself) in full-bodied casts are framed in constricted spaces where they have no room to move. Even in frames where individuals are next to each other, we can sense the tension between them. The artist's use of sharp colors as well as cramped spaces emphasizes anger and strong emotions. In one painting, a large, intertwined crowd appears to have been watching a wrestling match while assaying each other contentiously. Trying to free themselves of their anger and tension, characters in Mousavi's paintings are reinforcing them. Works in this exhibition were done before the recent protests in Iran. 

Having centered his previous collection on a character called “Sugar”, Sina Ghadaksaz is expanding and building on Sugar’s place in the world. For Ghadaksaz, the title of the work is an inseparable part of its semiotics. His are usually humorous or cheeky. Works are comprised of several pieces placed next to each other, much like sampling in hip-hop music. A portion of a popular song may be familiar to the listener but as soon as it turns into a sampled track, it’s function changes and it turns into a multi-layered, autonomous song. In multi-portion works, we arrive at a dialectical structure because of the tension between the two images. The simpler images function as an antithesis to the more complex ones. Their synthesis results in a visual objectification – neither a painting nor a collage – it becomes a "thing", Ghadaksaz believes. What Sugar shares with painting are that both are thingified and the visual experience is spiked as if by dopamine coming from sugar.