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Art Basel Hong Kong 2024
Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam -
Press Release
Dastan is pleased to announce its participation at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024. At Booth 3D25, Insights Sector, Dastan features a solo presentation of works by the late artist Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam (1924 – 2018). This marks Dastan’s second presence at the fair. The year 2024 marks one hundred years since the artist's birth. Fondazione Vaziri Moghaddam has programmed numerous international events and exhibitions titled Centenary Project in collaboration with several institutions and galleries, including Dastan. Art Basel Hong Kong will be open to public viewing from March 28 to 30, 2024, at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre.The presentation brings together several of Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s paintings engulfing a larger sculpture, aiming to present a panoramic view into the artist’s expansive vision and universe.Untitled (2016), a large 2 x 6m painting from the artist’s Sand Compositions series, will be displayed for the first time, along with several limited-edition prints in Dastan’s booth showroom. His sand paintings imagine an alternative tactile materiality on the surface. These paintings were conceived in a playful moment in the spring of 1959, and Vaziri kept trying his hand at them for the following three years until 1963. Different types of sand were applied to the canvas in their natural state or mixed with color.The booth also features a sculpture, Pardiss, from his articulated sculptures series. These works seem to escape the confines of their layers and borders. They were conceived in 1968 upon his return to Iran from Europe. They were designed as open and interactive artworks encouraging the viewer’s participation.“These sculptures possess elongated, serrated wooden parts attached to their middle bases through joints that could be manipulated and moved. In Vaziri’s words, ‘They would open and close just like human joints.’ According to the artist, the idea of these moving parts occurred while making and cutting pieces for the fixed sculptures. These earlier immobile sculptures were devised by intersecting a few shaped, colorful, flat plates, like fragments of a painting.*”Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s metaphorical approach to expressing ‘tactility’ through his playful renditions of geometric forms and abstractions is one of the most prominent aspects of his work. In creating limits and edges, the artist invoked musicality and rhythm to inspire a sense of movement in the forms and, in his words, “free them.”In his work, he imagines such movements and dynamism in sculptural pieces in light of his fascination with structural space. The pieces are expressed in relational motion, both within the space that they are presented in and relative to how they are viewed. Using different materials, the artist simultaneously induced transparency, rigidity, movement, ephemerality, timelessness, liquidity, and solidity.In his work, he imagines such movements and dynamism in sculptural pieces in light of his fascination with structural space. The pieces are expressed in relational motion, both within the space that they are presented in and relative to how they are viewed. Using different materials, the artist simultaneously induced transparency, rigidity, movement, ephemerality, timelessness, liquidity, and solidity.* Darabi, Helia. “Between Two Paradigms: Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s Art”. In “Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam Unrealised Projects”. Exhibition Catalog. 2021. Pejman Foundation. Tehran, Iran -
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Installation Views
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“From Tehran to Rome. A Journey through Art”. II episode - Hands in Earth. Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam.
“Hands in Earth” is the second episode of our brand-new video-series “From Tehran to Rome. A Journey through Art", featuring seven Italian and Iranian artists whose styles and artistic careers have been shaped in both countries. Episode 2 tells the life, work and artistic genius of Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, a first-generation Iranian modernist painter, with a special connection to Italy - the country where he spent most of his life and created many of his celebrated artworks, drawing inspiration from Italian nature. An Italian Embassy in Tehran production in cooperation with Yasmin Zandieh and Ehsan Ronagh, and “Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam Foundation”.
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Art Basel Film Section
For the Sake of Calmness by Newsha Tavakolian -
Press Release
Dastan is pleased to announce its participation at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, where it will feature a screening of For the Sake of Calmness (2020), a short film by Iranian photographer and video artist Newsha Tavakolian (b. 1981) at the fair’s Film Program, “Where to Go?”. The screening will be open to the public with limited seating on March 30, 2024, at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre auditorium. The program is only available to people aged 18 and above.
For the Sake of Calmness (2020, 19’07”) is a video written and directed by Newsha Tavakolian. In the video, inspired by an inwards exploration of the experience of PMS, Tavakolian explores how the phenomenon provides the artist with a specific lens for viewing and experiencing reality. It is narrated as an inner monologue that opens into several scenes and characters, each representing the physicality of the experience: heightened image definition and saturation, loud volume, characters, flowers, and even the ground covered in sweat, tears, or water. For the Sake of Calmness has been previously presented and screened at Pejman Foundation: Argo Factory (2021, Tehran), and Thomas Erban Gallery (2021, New York). The film has also been nominated for the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Ammodo Tiger Short Competition (Rotterdam, 2021).
For the Sake of Calmness is produced, directed, and narrated by Newsha Tavakolian, with cinematography by Peyman Shadmanfar, a score by Kamran Arashnia, and edited by Pooya Parsamagham.
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Newsha Tavakolian | Installation Views
