An Interview with Arash Nassiri
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| Arash Nassiri: ‘A Bug’s Life,’ 2026, installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, London, Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Fluentum, Berlin; and Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, produced by Chisenhale Gallery, photo by Andy Keate. Courtesy of the artist and Berlin Art Link |
by William Kherbek, Berlin Art Link
Forms of measurement are essentially arbitrary, the “foot,” after all, is based on a human foot. The “hand,” used to measure horses in the Anglosphere, is based on a human hand. The legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, writing in his poetry collection ‘A Wolf on Watch,’ embraces the relativities of determining scale: “I measure/The depth of the lagoon/By the croaking of frogs”—a reminder that even if measurement is inherently arbitrary it need not be anthropocentric. Philosophers and artists have long evoked the perspective of non-human entities to understand various human conceptions, and scale is no exception.
Tehran-born, Berlin-based artist Arash Nassiri’s recent exhibition ‘A Bug’s Life’ at London’s Chisenhale Gallery offers a lighthearted exploration of the incongruities created by disparities in size and perspective. Nassiri’s film—not to be confused with the Pixar film that shares the same title—follows the spatial and social foibles of an otherworldly insect, a small wooden puppet, that finds itself inside one of the vast Los Angeles mansions known as “Persian Palaces.” The lavish Beverly Hills residence featured in the film was commissioned in the 1980s by Iranian expats and designed by architect Hamid Omrani, and forms part of a small architectural trend that emerged in wealthy LA neighbourhoods after the Iranian Revolution. This style of home combined the grandeur of American luxury estates with eclectic elements of European classicism, later becoming disparagingly known as “Persian Palaces” and banned by the city of Los Angeles in 2004. The results of Nassiri’s film offer novel, and affecting, musings on notions of scale as a physical and a social quantity. Lately, the artist’s work has also inevitably been subsumed into geopolitical events operating at a scale far beyond the scope of an art film and these tensions also feature in our discussion.
William Kherbek: What prompted you to want to explore the insect as the protagonist in ‘A Bug’s Life’?
Arash Nassiri: These are private homes. The camera is not intended to be there, and as much as the public, or an artist, is unwanted there—it’s not his place, basically—an insect makes that metaphor material. Around the time of making the film, I had some rats in the studio, so I sometimes felt like: “is this my place or is it someone else’s place?” I wanted to use the figure of the insect to address this idea.
The second reason was formal, I would say. Since the architecture is really pushing its monumentality, the insect pushes it even further. I used the leverage of the camera, where you can go microscopic or macroscopic.
WK: Thinking in terms of the scale of standard cinema, the film is fairly short, but in terms of the lifespan of an insect, the period we see depicted probably would be a significant amount of time. Were you trying to emphasize that difference in timescale as well as physical scale?
AN: It’s a life adventure, and during the editing I was figuring that out: this is his world, this is a microcosm. With the painted ceiling of a sky and the moon, it’s kind of a world in itself and has everything that you need.
In my work, I always love to build or to play with a framework. In this case, the insect and the puppetry were part of that world. At some point, I recalled the movie ‘Wild Robot’ (2024), which has this incredible scene where raccoons, who are following the robots, have glowing eyes. I’m sure the writers really pushed on the internet imagery of infrared photography—these memes of raccoons in a garden at night, looking at the camera. I loved how they recalled this popular imagery. I thought I could also do this, and so the imagery of the insect’s glowing eyes became a proposal for me. It also set the time: it’s night, and we filmed night-for-day, so we kind of play with this additional technique of filming during the day, but making it look like night. There’s also the literality of the insect acting as a lamp torch, lighting up the space and the camera.
WK: As you mention, there’s a sense of grandiosity in these spaces, and I wanted to ask about the idea of grandiosity versus grandeur in the piece. We see incredibly opulent interiors onscreen, but the magazine article from the LA Times shown in the piece, ‘In Defense of the Persian Palace’ (2006), by Greg Goldin, describes them as being too gaudy for some. Could you discuss this thread of the work, the disambiguating of the grand from grandeur?
AN: The purpose of the film was to unfold the story of the homes, so there’s everything the material of the home says. One big part of the desire to make this work for me was the gap between the materiality and the reception in public space—whether that’s in the neighborhood or in newspapers. They misnamed them “Persian Palaces” and I was struck to see that there was nothing Iranian about them: they’re French, they’re Greek. For me, this distance says a lot about the situation of immigration, and it also speaks about a trend that was present in Tehran in the 1960s and 70s, of building in western styles. What I found interesting was that if you try to unroll this story to the start, it goes back as early as the 19th century with the invention of lithography and photography in Europe. We often talk about “Orientalism,” but in Iran in some places among the elites, there was an “Occidentalism.” What I found interesting was a kind of desire for the modernity that goes with the Industrial Revolution. This style was a way of harnessing this innovation for Iran, and went through iterations over time.
The style in the film goes back to the Pacific Coast community at that time. They were banned in the early 2000s, so slowly they are going to disappear. It’s a kind of architectural trope. This was what I was enjoying about researching them. Showing the newspaper article was also a way to get the voices that you hear coming from the news or from radio shows or phone conversations into the work. The figure you follow exists in another plane to this language, and this for me was also interesting: the way you can play with dimensions in scale, you can play with dimensions in language, too.
WK: You mention the phone call: the garbled conversation of the phone call in the film also touches on questions of apparently resolved distances. Technology, in theory, reduces latency for communication across distant spaces, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce misunderstanding, possibly the contrary.
AN: I always love the texture of a phone conversation. It’s commonplace, everyone knows this feeling of talking to someone and the compression of the voice comes through the phone, and as much as it may be a familiar voice for me, it’s also a cyborg voice, a voice that is computer compressed. I already find this very powerful.
The film is written to activate items within the home. Once we selected the home, there were objects to deal with. There was the piano, the phone, the perfume dispenser and a few other things, and so we built little skits, like cartoon skits, with them.
For the phone call, I just started to record a conversation with my mum. She was in Qeshm, that’s near the Strait of Hormuz, and she was telling me she was stung by a scorpion and I was like: “oh, that’s a bug’s life, too!” What I loved is how the voice kind of activates your ears’ eyes. There are the things you see, the things you read, the things you hear, but there are also the things you see [by] hearing, and so it kind of layers on the image and creates a double image. The outside call also helps to get out of the microcosm—since the home is a microcosm—through this little story of the sandstorm. When we spoke with the sound designer Nicolas Becker, he had this fantastical idea of rebuilding the sandstorm through the home’s windows’ pressure and I thought that’s great; it’s the outside also getting weirder. It was also about disturbing the localization. This kind of multiplication, for me, is disorienting and, hopefully, it creates a dizzying sensation for the viewer.
WK: In thinking about the notion of a “disturbed locality” that does seem to be a theme throughout the work, not least in the newspaper article shown, which is touching on the difference between the Palaces’ flashiness and the kind of “quiet luxury” boasted by old money—though that’s not really the LA style either. I wonder if you could speak about the racialized dimensions of what is “flash” versus what is “classy” in the elite consumption discourses the film touches on.
AN: That’s what made it a subject for me: the gap between the materiality of these homes and their reception through the worlds of the neighbors, and the newspapers, and this misnaming. It’s all misleading. It doesn’t talk about the house, but about the people who made the house. That’s kind of the subject, or one of the two subjects I would say.
The second part I love goes more to the point of this community of expats. They don’t really care about modernism as an aesthetic. They go for these ornamental productions, and they’re outrageous, but in some ways they want to fit in, and this contradiction was very dear to me. They want to reproduce the American dream. They want to show their success. They want to show their wealth, but at the same time they want to show their pride and heritage, which is also kind of not their heritage, so it’s already contradicting itself. The part I like is how ostentatious it is, and how they really don’t care about taste; it’s just for them, really. It’s a kind of anti-modernism and being ostentatious, and I see something there.
WK: The ostentation is the most American thing about them.
AN: In the film, there are many reflections: the marble is reflecting, the materials are reflecting, and for me it’s this mirror game between the histories, the cultures, one mimicking the other. I tried to make the imagery like an ice palace in a funfair. That was my goal, to get close to this in showing how the structure of these homes has this fairytale quality.
WK: Inevitably, this interview will appear as the war on Iran is taking place (or in some latent state of uneasy peace). In that light, I couldn’t help thinking of the sickening term the US military has often used for civilian casualties, “bug splat.” Is this reference implied in the work? As I watched your film, I couldn’t help thinking that those of us outside of the oligarchy are increasingly “insectified” by our rulers. We’re “bugs” they can kill when and how they choose, with no meaningful consequence.
AN: It was never my goal. When the film was starting it was something close to a cartoon, as I mentioned, because I wanted the film to be lighthearted and funny. It was meant to escape this expectation, this reading of power. It was more about having joyful thoughts, but I’m trapped, because this is history, and now I cannot escape this reading, for obvious reasons. I would only say I am trapped within the very reading that I tried to escape, naïvely probably. We are living in this era of polycrisis, and it is not just Iran, but the climate crisis, and war. It’s a bit like laughing about the scorpion in the phone call: “I don’t know what happened. I almost died, but it’s fine.”
See more images here
This article was part of Berlin Art Link feature topic Scale.
Via Berlin Art Link
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