Refusing to Perform an Identity

Ahead of his Venice exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion, the artist, Abbas Akhavan, reflected on diasporic distance and withholding as a form of poetic practice in an interview

Cast for a Folly, 2023, installation view, ‘Curtain Call’, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 2023. Photograph by David Stjernholm. Courtesy the artist, The Third Line, Dubai and Frieze. 

Interview by Aram Moshayedi, Frieze

This conversation between curator Aram Moshayedi and artist Abbas Akhavan took place in the immediate aftermath of military strikes on Iran – an event that inevitably shapes the tenor of their exchange. While the discussion turns to Akhavan’s upcoming projects, including his Venice Biennale presentation at the Canada Pavilion (commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada) and an upcoming survey at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, it also reflects on the uneasy expectations placed on artists in moments of political crisis. Moving between questions of diasporic distance, cultural representation and the limits of artistic agency, Akhavan speaks candidly about the pressures to perform identity – and the possibility that withholding, rather than declaration, can itself be a position. 

Aram Moshayedi: I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around how to begin in light of the last few days in Iran. How to address the situation there obviously weighs upon me, but I also feel as outsiders we don’t have much authority on the subject. The tenor of this conversation would be so different if we’d spoken last week. While the focus is still you and your work, I want to ask before we begin: how do we deal with this military attack on Iran from your perspective as an Iranian Canadian artist? 

Abbas Akhavan: I currently live in Berlin. As I was walking home to get to this call, I was amazed at how everyone is going about their day as if nothing grave has happened. They’re just living their lives. And I thought: Oh yes, so am I. It’s as if it’s just another day, when obviously it isn’t. As of now, there hasn’t been time to reflect on what any of this means. Having said that, I feel like we’re still in the extended version of the ‘shock and awe’ strategy the US military used in Iraq in 2003. It is horrendous.

AM: In my case, I feel an emotional heaviness around this, but I am also apprehensive or reluctant to speak in any direct way about my perceptions or how I feel about what is happening or what will happen in Iran. Perhaps there is a similarity in how you have navigated speaking about your own identity. None of this is made any easier when there’s a war going on and you’re called upon to speak on behalf of an entire population from which you are disconnected. But it’s also a question of how to navigate these conversations, even among other Iranians, and how to talk about something without having to talk about it.

“Tarragon”—a short story

In a wartime childhood shaped by scarcity and ritual, a pair of twins become obsessed with a plant their grandfather cannot grow.

Amani Abeid, Untitled, oil on canvas, 200x150cm, 2024. Courtesy Tewas Art Gallery and the Markaz Review.

by Erfan Mojib, The Markaz Review

Grandpa didn’t think growing tarragon was possible. He grew all sorts of other herbs that filled the plastic container in the fridge year-round: basil, dill, parsley, coriander, peppermint, chives, spring onions, chilies, tiny radishes that Grandma turned into little red roses with two quick cuts of her sharp knife. When guests came over, she shaped spring onions into white hyacinths. With all those colors, Grandma’s herb container looked like the Garden of Eden.

Tarragon was different. It was exotic, hard to find, harder to grow. One spring, Ahmad, a colleague of Grandpa’s, brought him a box of tarragon from the countryside. He tried propagating the cuttings in different pots, applying every farming trick he knew. None of them took. Everyone knew he had a green thumb, but tarragon defeated him.

After that, he stopped trying. Instead, we bought tarragon from the Friday market. Merchants brought it from the south, near the warfront where Father served and which Grandma added to her Garden of Eden. She loved anything that came from the south, believing it carried Father’s smell. We examined the dark green leaves with awe. Grandpa looked at them with frustration. Grandma always saved a couple of batches of tarragon for the winter. She dried it on a big copper tray and stored it in jam jars, sealing the checkered lids to preserve their magic aroma.

And tarragon did work magic. A tiny amount was enough to turn a mediocre lamb stew sublime. On its own, it smelled divine. It was only later, after everything, that I learned it derived its name from the Greek word for dragon. A green dragon in a pot. Grandma knew its power, only adding a pinch to certain dishes. Tarragon was treated almost like saffron, with dignity and respect.

Symbolic accumulation as an act of universal resistance

Navid Azimi Sajadi at Studio la Linea Verticale

Navid Azimi Sajadi, “Untitled”, 2025, carpet, hand-woven wool tapestry with cotton base, 89×151 cm (179 with fringes). Courtesy Studio la Linea Verticale and Juliet Art Magazine.

by Emanuela Zanon, Juliet Art Magazine

Mater Ex Mater – Act I, solo exhibition by Navid Azimi Sajadi (Tehran, 1982) currently on in Bologna at Studio la Linea Verticale, is the first public configuration of a project that was meant to be more expansive and which now, in its lacunae, concretely shows the destructive consequences of every war. Geopolitical pressure made it impossible to complete the original plan, and what the public encounters is what the artist managed to bring out of Iran before the conflict closed every passage. Carpets produced under his direct supervision in the Mozafariyeh district (a historic area within the bazaar of Tabriz, renowned since the twelfth century for the trade and production of high-quality Persian carpets, now a UNESCO site), ceramics belonging to previous cycles, drawings on paper, preparatory cartoons. It is an Act I that bears its own incompleteness inscribed in the title as a structural condition, the hallmark of a cultural resistance exercised precisely in the act of bringing to safety fragments of a visual universe threatened by the violent irruption of history.

But it would be reductive to read Mater Ex Mater solely through the lens of biographical and political urgency. The project has its roots in a question that Navid Azimi Sajadi has been asking himself for years with growing insistence: what does it mean to be a contemporary Iranian artist? It is not a matter of an identity belonging to be defended nor of a folklore to be preserved, but of the ethical and existential need to understand where one’s gaze comes from, what the deep structures (symbolic, formal, philosophical) are that shape it before critical consciousness and design intention set themselves in motion.

Inside Iran’s New Sculptural Language of Memory and Desire

Hanie Rahimian and Shiva Abazariyan are an emerging Iranian artist duo from Mashhad whose collaborative practice spans sculpture, paper mache, ceramics, installation, and animation. Working between painting‑based drawing and three‑dimensional forms, they blend humor, introspection, and material experimentation to offer fresh perspectives on contemporary Iranian art.

Courtesy Emaho.

Interview by Emaho

Emaho: You both grew up in Mashhad. How has the city, its energy, and your childhood environment influenced the way you perceive the world and eventually led you toward art?

Hanieh: Shiva and I both grew up in Mashhad, a crowded city full of contradictions. Our childhood took shape in a religious and ritualistic environment, yet my family was neither religious nor traditional and had a strong interest in art. My father was particularly passionate about art, especially music. My mother was a teacher who decorated her classroom walls with drawings, and I vividly remember how she would often draw small illustrations for me in the corners of my notebooks. Those images became my first encounters with drawing and sparked my early interest in visual art.

Shiva: My family, like Hanieh’s, was not traditional or religious. They were deeply interested in art and encouraged me from a young age to pursue it. My father and brother were involved in music, and my mother painted. I was always an observer of their practices. I remember my mother drawing for me while telling stories, and sometimes my brother and I would draw directly on the walls of our home. These simple, everyday moments naturally placed me on this path.