Abbas Zahedi
Photo credit: Abbas Zahedi, Performance of Rose and STEMM, 2019. Photo: Katarzyna Perlak. Courtesy of ICF.
Abbas Zahedi has long been interested in Sarat Maharaj’s 2002 essay, Xeno-Epistemics. In this text, Maharaj refers to art knowledge as ‘a matter of inventing other ways of thinking-knowing […] other epistemological engines [… and] ways of knowing otherness.’ The work Abbas has developed for Making Time builds upon this idea, specifically, he asks how to make an ‘art that is not Art’ and how to perform research without performing ‘Research,’ to make other modes of thinking-knowing possible. Abbas has proposed a course of actions that partly forgo (and, at the same time, aim to broaden) the material basis of artistic production. As a process of ‘becoming-other-than-material’ – through dialogues, embodiment and (quantum) experimentation - Abbas hopes that this course will reopen and enliven discourses that go beyond the binary of material/immaterial. And further, how this ‘becoming’ can be extended beyond corporeal contact. For Abbas, this course of actions is more about material expansion than conceptual closure.
Bio
UK-based artist, Abbas Zahedi studied medicine at University College London, before completing his MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins in 2019. Abbas blends contemporary philosophy, poetics, and social dynamics with performative and new-media modes. With an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave, Abbas makes connections whenever possible with people involved in the particular situations upon which he focuses. Selected exhibitions include: Metatopia 10013, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); The London Open 2022, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Postwar Modern, Barbican, London (2022); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); Temporary Compositions, Gallery 31 Somerset House, London (2021); Yarmonics 2021, Great Yarmoth, UK (2021); D.E.VALUATION, Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier (2021); 11 & 1, Belmacz, London (2021); Governmental Fires, FUTURA, Prague (2021); In Hindsight…, Bladr, Copenhagen (2020); and Ouranophobia SW3, Chelsea Sorting Office, London (2020).