Intro

April 2 – August 6, 2017, KINDL – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Opening: April 1, 5 pm

The KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art is presenting the first comprehensive retrospective in Berlin of the Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi (*1974, lives in Zurich). The exhibition will feature a selection of Shahbazi’s works from the past fifteen years, mostly consisting of photographs. The artist has created very heterogeneous groups of works in parallel: black-and-white landscapes, sumptuous still lifes, geometric abstractions, and documentary photographs. With some sixty works, the exhibition distils this spectrum into a visual cosmos of pictures that develops beyond categories such as stylistic similarity and logical temporal sequences.

As varied as the subjects are, Shahbazi’s pictures always also deal with photography itself, the particularities of the medium, the freezing of a moment, the materiality of things, and the cultural codings of representations, subjects, and places. Often her works take shape in processes of transformation—for instance, when the artist translates pictures from a trip from Zurich to Tehran into two-tone lithographic prints, or when she builds precise spatial objects, only to transfer them into an apparently abstract geometric photographic surface. In Shirana Shahbazi’s works, the capturing and constructing of reality thus becomes an opportunity for reflection about the codes and conventions inscribed in the visible.

A publication will accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Andreas Fiedler.