Shahryar Nashat

Shahryar Nashat

Birth : , Geneva, Switzerland

History

Shahryar Nashat (b. 1975, Geneva) makes sculptures, videos, and other works in which the human body and its representations play a central role. However, this is not merely a matter of visual analysis. Rather, Nashat gets at the very experience of what it means to be a body at a moment when the technologies that filter experience encourage fragmentation and distance. Desire, mortality, fragility, and resilience are among the thematic concerns his work addresses. Nashat pays special attention to framing and pedestals, treating them as integral parts of his work. He also often alters a gallery’s architecture and lighting, allowing his exhibitions to function as fully embodied meditations on art’s ability to reflect the current state of human life. Their prescience and mystery also make them function as windows into an uncertain future. Shahryar Nashat is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through March 8, 2020. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at SMK—Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2019); Swiss Institute (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt (2016); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2010); and Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland (2009). He was included in Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); Le Grand Balcon, La Biennale de Montréal (2016); 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); and ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011), among many other institutional group exhibitions. Nashat’s work features in the permanent collections of a number of museums worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Turin, Italy; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Zürich; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Profile

Shahryar Nashat

Movies

Ordinal (SW/NE)
Ordinal (SW/NE)
Thanks
The film traces the cultural and environmental influences of a soil-dwelling, pathogenic fungus, Coccidioides immitis, and its associated disease, valley fever, in California's Central Valley. Interweaving past, present and mythological time, the film draws upon historical and cultural references, including the plight of migrants during the Depression, the spread of the disease in recent years, contemporary theories of climate change, and the significance of the desert wind in ancient Assyria. In Ruperto and Keagy’s film, natural phenomena remain neutral, fleeing from any kind of judgment and avoiding binary oppositions of positive and negative, destruction and regeneration, life and death.
Plaque
Plaque
Writer
Short about music and construction work.
Plaque
Plaque
Director
Short about music and construction work.
Modern Body Comedy
Modern Body Comedy
Director
Modern Body Comedy is shot on a bare theatre stage in Super 8mm film and later converted to digital format. The work combines miscellaneous forms of theatre genres such as drama and comedy and also reveals the act of creating artistic situations. Two men act out these questions in a choreographed performance in which a pair of shoes and socks, a false moustache and a broken chair are the props for their games. A latent homo-erotic tension and a subtle power struggle provide the narrative base. Nashat, always interested in the dynamics of the body, builds up an outrageous tension, which is unpredictably dissolved by a physical incident reminding of a very popular slapstick element.