All of You

Installation view: Andisheh Avini: All of You at Martos Gallery, New York, 2026. Courtesy Martos Gallery, Steven Probert Studio and The Brooklyn Rail.

by Ekin Erkan, The Brooklyn Rail

Iranian-American artist Andisheh Avini’s All of You consists of printed postcards, blown glass, steel sculptures, found objects, and sound as one immersive installation. To varying degrees, each of the works draws on Iranian/Persian leitmotifs as recollected by the artist. The structures are endowed with a mediated sense of cultural-historical remembrance as the assemblages, with their various connotations to Persian mythos, architecture, and decorative art history, are filtered through Avini’s episodic memory. Ultimately, it is less so Avini’s remembering that us viewers are able to participate in, foreclosed as we are to his phenomenology and biographical history; rather, the works’ strength is in their reconciling well-examined symbolic folk traditions.

There are several constituent series within the show, each of which requires cultural-anthropological explication to properly appreciate. That is, one should not be overly taken by the presence of twelve postcards, some of which depict Avini’s works and others which provide photographic glances of various Tehran semblances. For, while we are admittedly in the grips of Avini’s nostalgia here, there are also strictly sociological referents that have fixed reference. Without possessing a command of the latter, one is left spinning in the wheels of sheer aesthetics—delighting in the installed marquetry spines and glass organs by misinterpreting them as merely colorful delights. This is, however, to improperly retrofit formalism on Avini’s more layered art practice.

The exhibition begins with Avini’s untitled coal-black stainless steel pointed arch, its highest point matching his height. The work’s strength is in its historical relationship to the form of orgival Mihrab prayer niches. These architectural structures famously line Safavid-era mosques like the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan. A similar relationist principle anchors Avini’s resplendent untitled 2024 marquetry bust. The bust might very well be Avini’s own visage but its true value is tethered to the broader subtending Persian decorative history from with it emerges: the ancient Persian Khatam Kari craft tradition of inlaying functional items like vases, mirror frames, windows, and Qur’an boxes with geometric patterns constructed from lustrous materials like ivory, pearl, and gold.

The next set of objects are Avini’s bulbous and circular striated blown glass spherules. Vertical lines gather along the cherry-red, mauve, and golden spheroid structures’ vertices; many of their twisted edges slightly unwrap like confectionery treats. They are paired with more amorphous forms, such as a teetering golden-orange wedge delicately balanced atop a pedestal. The press release tells us that “[a]t varying states of rupture and explosion,” these forms “evoke the plastic stripes of a popular childhood toy that has persisted across several generations of Iranian children, shaping core experiences and memories. Also called a Poppy or Pearl Ball, these toys were initially introduced in Iran during a period of economic change dominated by the petroleum industry.” One might also add that they resemble Safavid-era pulled candies and the Atlasi hard confectionaries sold in various Iranian markets and sweet shops.

Five assemblages consisting of similarly candy-colored blown glass organs dot marquetry-adorned spinal cords. Some line the gallery walls, protruding like zoological studies. Others dangle from the roof, their upright form suggesting the decorated bones and body parts of a deceased human being. This is the strongest sub-series on display, dovetailing both the Khatam Kari pattern-making handicraft tradition and Persian literary metaphors. Each spine is flanked by a coterie of polysemous symbolic markers: “del” (heart), “jigar” (liver), and abdomen. In Persian, “del,” not only means “heart” in the anatomical sense but also “heart-stomach,” connoting courage, mindfulness, and patience (without being reducible to any of the aforementioned definitions). As Farzad Sharifian writes in his 2008 essay, Conceptualisations of del ‘heart-stomach’ in Persian, “[t]he word del can also be used in Persian to refer to the middle or inner part of something. The middle of the night, for example, might be referred to as the del-e shab (del-of night), a conceptualization that is parallel to the English the heart of the night.” In everyday Persian, “jigar,” is expression of endearment that idiomatically picks out someone whom the speaker cares for dearly (e.g., “Jigar talâ,” translates to “gold liver,” or “Kheyli jigari” which translates to “You are really a liver!” are all expressions of affection). Lastly, as Sharifian’s study clarifies, “abdomen” is continuous with “del,” as “[t]he word del is translated in the Aryanpur Persian-English Dictionary … as ‘heart, stomach, abdomen, belly, guts, mind, courage, patience, middle’” and “[w]hen used literally in contemporary Persain, it refers to the area of the body below the chest and above the pelvis, roughly similar to the area described in English by abdomen.”

This constellation of meaning gains greater significance through the close spatial order. But one can only make proper sense of these assemblages if they contend with this polysemy, engaging with Avini’s symbolism. In many ways, Avini’s art practice is a form of sociological preservation, imbued with renewed importance given the destruction of cultural artifacts in the, at the time of this review’s writing, ongoing “Ramadan War.” When the works were initially created and when the exhibition was first mounted, the military incursion upon Iran had not yet taken place. However, in the last three weeks, several UNESCO World Heritage sites like the Chehel Sotoun Palace and the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan have suffered significant structural damage. It is unlikely that the artist could have anticipated that his works would be so suffused with commemorative prowess. As the war continues and other important sites like Naqsh-e Jahan Square risk further damage, Avini’s works, purely by dint of the socio-historical and epochal context in which they find themselves, are now endowed with an documentary-memorializing animating force. The works bring to bear the methodological query of how we should understand commemoration in a period of heightened destruction. Can we take their meaning to properly encompass that which their creator could not have foreseen? Philosophers of art like Arthur Danto and Noël Carroll would detract from the affirmative answer, underscoring that artworks amount to fixed embodied meanings where, amongst other conditions, the art-object’s aboutness projects an attitude or point-of-view imputed by the artist before or during—but certainly not after—its creation. In his well-known 1950 essay, The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger stakes the opposite position, whereby “[t]he origin of something is the source of its nature.” Following Heidegger, artworks can, regardless of the artist's conscious intentions, reveal a way of life related to the broader “world” that the artwork, qua representational archive, occupies, facilitating the percipient's “visual realization” of this “truth.”

It is not immediately clear that artistic meaning applied ex post facto is impermissible in all instances. After all, commemoration of Persian artifacts and socio-historical folk practices is certainly part of Avini’s practice and intended meaning; but, all the same, the works were created outside of the scope of war-time preservation. With demolition and eradication informing their unintended contextual meaning, the works carry greater gravity. They now share a concern that prompted Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari’s “Material Speculation: ISIS” (2015-2016) series, where, responding to ISIS’s destruction of artifacts at sites like the Mosul Cultural Museum, she 3D printed translucent replicas of the destroyed sculptures and objects. The difference, however, is that the latter artist had her sights set on preserving that which was already destroyed, whereas Avini sought to commemorate living decorative traditions by illuminating practices that Western audiences would likely be otherwise ignorant of.

I do not have a settled answer as to whether artworks can be appended with retroactive novel or additive meanings. The issue is deserving of serious philosophical consideration and debate. Although Avini’s work is indelibly anchored in various Iranian and Persian Islamic decorative traditions and leitmotifs, many of which belong to practices indigenous to ancient cities like Qom, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Kerman. The artist’s commemorative approach invests them with a significant degree of idiosyncrasy, such that they are not cultural referents as such. They are also not purely personal markers, but mediated by a rich historical tapestry of Persian craftsmanship. Engaging with this tapestry and its coeval time-honored traditions, which Avini has assiduously adapted, makes them well worth viewing. The epochal conditions, however, galvanize these assemblages with a related, albeit somber, profundity.

More images here.

Via The Brooklyn Rail