Uncharted Echoes: A group exhibition at Ab-Anbar

Marlon de Azambuja (b.1978, Brasil, Porto Alegre), lives and works in Paris, France. De Azambuja works across a range of media including sculpture, installation, photography, and drawing. His work explores architecture and urbanism and the power-structures and norms that emanate from public space design choices. He is particularly interested in the history of Modernist architecture in Brazil and how this has affected collective consciousness and affected people’s lives. Frequently using found materials, De Azambuja’s work is often site-specific and strongly tied to the location he physically intervenes in. 

De Azambuja has exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at Alternder Warehouses, Hamburg; MEIAC, Spain; and Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco. His work is in various notable collections, including the Ministry of Culture, Spain; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Museo Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil; and Nomas Foundation, Rome. De Azambuja is recognized as one of the leading contemporary artists in Brazil, and his work has received critical acclaim for its thought-provoking exploration of social and political issues.

Taha Heydari (b. 1986, Iran, Tehran), lives and works in Baltimore, USA. He moved to Baltimore in 2014 to pursue his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and completed his degree in Hoffberger School of Painting, in 2016.

Pixelated broken tv images, caused by Iranian government satellite jamming, triggered Heydari's fascination with the moment of glitch. He considers glitch as a visible instance of separation between what an image does, what it is made of, and how it appears to us. He uses acrylic and various palette knives, rollers, and airbrush to create complex, highly detailed surfaces where he can accentuate the significance of tools, material, and technology in the act of representation. Heydari is represented by Ab-Anbar Gallery and his work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC Haines Gallery, San Francisco, Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York, NY. Heydari lives and works in Baltimore, USA.

Avish Khebrezadeh (b.1969, Iran), lives and works in Washington DC. She studied painting at the Academy of fine arts in Rome. Her work explores the power of figures and their multifaceted narrative aspect in a multitude of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, animation, film as well as video projections onto drawings and paintings. 

Solo exhibitions of her work have appeared around the globe in institutions such as National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Victoria and Albert museum (London), MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, MAXXI (National Museum of 21st century Arts, Rome, Italy), and MONA (The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia) Her work has been featured in the in 50th Venice Biennale 2003, where she received the Golden Lion Award for the best Young Italian Artist.  6th Istanbul Biennale 1999, the 5th Liverpool Biennale in 2008, the 8th Site Santa Fe Biennale (Santa Fe, New Mexico), and the inaugural exhibition of MAXXI, Rome's first museum of 21st century art. 

Khebrehzadeh's works have been included in prestigious Institutional collections such as MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome), Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria), MONA (The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia), the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, Rhode Island), MAXXI (National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome, Italy), and GAM museum in Turin, Italy.

Timo Nasseri (b.1972, Germany, Berlin), lives and works in Berlin. Having studied photography at the Berliner Lette-Verein, Nasseri is an heir to both German rationalism and oriental mysticism. 

His choice of material ranges from stainless steel to magnets, mirrors, ceramics and wood.

For years, his works drew inspirations from the geometry found in a diverse range of subjects, including quantum physics or the complex organic patterns found in Islamic architecture. However, Nasseri’s recent Universal Alphabet series began with a fascination for the deconstructed ‘Razzle Dazzle’ patterns deployed as camouflage on war ships in WW1. He Commented, ‘I took the original Razzle Dazzle designs and gave them back their power as demons, gods and protectors. By mirroring basic geometrical forms, suddenly you get these hybrids between an insect, a traditional mask, a demon and a totem – forms which seem to be charged with a certain mystical power.’ Featuring 750 ‘letters’ cut from metal, ‘The Order of Everything’ (2018), takes this re-invented and deconstructed alphabet of signs and signals to its most reduced and charged form.

Raha Raissnia (b.1968, Iran, Tehran), lives and works in New York. Her practice is situated on the crossroad of painting, drawing and filmmaking, and how they are interconnected and enveloped in one another. She associates her work with Expanded Cinema practices, as she manipulates cinema's structural elements in regards to space, time, frame, projectors and screen in live performances and loop installation.Her work is layered and permutational and combines both analog and digital technologies with a strong reliance on the hand made.

Raha Raissnia creates architectural and mazey spaces which combine abstract and figurative elements. They seem to incarnate movement and develop on their own. Sometimes such spaces are inhabited with phantom-like human figures, and at times they remain empty. Temples and shadowy streets of fantastic cities, arenas and structures that remind of scaffoldings, Raha Raissnia's imagery crosses multiple references and interlaces different timelines. Memories of the past melt down to form a dreamlike vision of our bio-synthetic future.

The multidisciplinary interconnectedness of Raha Raissnia's work creates a complex mise-en-abyme between architectonic elements and biomorphic geometry, shifting the viewer's perspective between an anatomy of living organisms and advanced electronic circuitry, while passing through an array of influences and references that are at once both ancient and futuristic.

Hessam Samavatian (b. 1984, Iran, Tehran), lives and works in Vienna. He studied photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Gabriele Rothemann and graduated in 2017 with the extensive diploma ' ImSchatten Kein Schwarz' (No black in the Shadows). In his mostly installative works, photography becomes an independent theme and motif and correspondingly, often assumes unusual forms. His work explores the optical-chemical properties of photography, such as the light sensitivity of analogue materials, or the technical standards of image formats produced by large manufacturers. He is also concerned with the metaphorical readability of photography as shadow or vessel and the symbolism of terms such as 'candela' - or an interest in representations which diverge from the traditional 'decisive moment' of most photography.

Samavatian's work has been exhibited widely internationally and is held in numerous private and public collections. Born in Iran and living in Vienna since 1998, Samavatian repeatedly finds himself confronted with the cultural differences between the European and Persian/Iranian conceptual worlds.

Baktash Sarang (b. 1981, Iran, Tehran), lives and works between Paris and Tehran. He is an interdisciplinary artist who creates work about the human body and its connection to its surroundings and habitat. He makes use of diverse mediums including drawing, architecture, sculpture and most recently installation and model-making.

Sarang trained in fine arts at IRIB art school, before going on to receive his BA degree in visual arts from Azad University of Art and Architecture in 2005.  After graduation, he moved to France, where he undertook a course in Metal sculpture at Haute Écoles des Arts du Rhin, HEAR in Strasbourg (2012). He was selected as artist in residence at Académie des Beaux Arts, Institut de France, Fondation Dufraine, before going on to study at Université Paris 1, pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France, where he was awarded his MA in 2015. 

In recent years, alongside drawings, he has been working on installation projects with links to architectural issues. For his MA thesis, Tower of Silence (Tower of Babel), Sarang examined the fall of utopian projects, taking inspiration from historical Iranian towers and the relationship of the human body to architectural spaces to create his sculptures. Sarang has held several solo exhibitions and participated in multiple group exhibitions and biennales, including the International Architecture Biennale di Venezia (2018).

Nil Yalter (b.1938, Cairo, Egypt), lives and works in Paris. A pioneer in the French feminist art movement of the 1970s, Yalter was educated at Robert College, the prestigious American secondary educational institution in Istanbul. While she was engaged in dance, theatre and painting during this time, she also practised pantomime and travelled by foot to India as a pantomime artist. Yalter has lived in Paris since 1965. She participated in the French counter culture and revolutionary political movement of the late 1960s, immersing herself in the debates around gender, migrant workers from Turkey, and other issues of the time. These social movements and ethnographic science have influenced the artist's videos, performances and installations from the 1970s in the form of an idiosyncratic, pluralistic aesthetics. The influence of abstract traditions, especially that of Russian constructivism can be observed in her paintings and digital works since her early years. Nil Yalter's works reflect a style that blends together all these influences along with autobiographical elements where the personal and the political intertwine.