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Cacophony

Cromwell Place, Pavilion Gallery

4 Cromwell Place, London
SW7 2JE, United Kingdom 
 

AB-ANBAR is pleased to announce, Cacophony, an exhibition featuring the work of four contemporary and modern artists from their gallery programme; Sonia Balassanian, Majid Fathizadeh, Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, and Timo Nasseri. Founded in 2014, AB-ANBAR is one of the leading independent galleries in Tehran and the artists presented in this exhibition are representative of the gallery’s ongoing mission to promote internationally important works by artists from Iran and other latitudes. The exhibition is part of the Middle Eastern focus week at the Cromwell Place held in association with Abu Dhabi art fair and is timed to coincide with ‘Epic Iran’ at the V&A which also features the work of Timo and 3 other artists from the gallery programme. 

Few societies have experienced such a period of rapid modernization as Iran during the last century and the flow of ideas and artists both in and out of the country that this has produced. Whilst all the artists featured in this exhibition have a common Iranian heritage which has informed aspects of their work, it is their Internationalism which shines through and the merging of different cultures towards a quest for a new identity. 

This exhibition is about order but ‘order’ as a concept is challenged by an intuitive analysis of ‘chaos’; a state alluded to in the exhibition title ‘Cacophony’ with its direct reference to the eclectic soundscapes utilised in the video and installation-based work of Balassanian. The featured works in Cacophony vary from the very chaotic scenes painted by Fathizadeh and the experimental films of Balassanian – to the precise highly ordered geometrical compositions of Timo’s or Vaziri’s. Balassanian’s paintings stand somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, mediating an orderly/disorderly amalgamation or transformative modes. 

Seen as a whole, the works in Cacophony reveal a clear message: there is an embedded chaos within societies and individual civilians; a state of anarchy. Even the most ordered forms or living conditions have concealed states of turmoil within them. This condition is revealed vividly here in some of the works by Balassanian and Fathizadeh but seen in a confrontational yet tamed and ordered way in the works by Vaziri and Nasseri.