Navid Nuur
MINING MEMORY
1 May–27 June 2015
Opening: Friday 1 May, 6–9pm
Galeria Plan B
Potsdamer Strasse 77–87
10785 Berlin
1–30 May 2015
Galerie Max Hetzler
Goethestraße 2/3
10623 Berlin
Special opening times during Gallery Weekend Berlin:
Saturday 2 and Sunday 3 May, 11am–7pm
Navid Nuur’s new project, titled MINING MEMORY, will unconventionally take place in two different venues in Berlin: Plan B and Galerie Max Hetzler. Visitors will have the chance to experience new perspectives on the multi-positional, and in this case, multi-dimensional practice of Nuur, which is represented in both galleries through a different set of works.
At the core of Nuur’s exhibitions is a new fictional interview with a rock, which follows previous chapters of his text-based works like interview with water and the black color. This almost Platonic text makes the present constellation of Nuur’s works, which he calls interimodules, appear as monoliths, questioning the definition of timelessness in relation of artworks to the world in which they can be found. Nuur’s MINING MEMORY cycle is the most objective in artistic goals so far as it attempts to create a system out of his oeuvre which is mentally self-sustaining, making sense without human creative interpretation or misinterpretation, imbuing his work with a logic that makes us face eternity.
The new works of Nuur, as the title already suggests, are the most plastic and sculptural works yet from his otherwise ethereal repertoire. Nuur’s work references stones and rocks from a very open perspective, sometimes approaching the topic within the context of mountain climbing, and in other cases, alchemy. His work also combines different minerals to create hybrids. For instance, a recent work, Rerocked, melted all types of stones which can be found on Earth into one single rock. Other mineral forms, including fossils, graphite, gold and even materials relating to dinosaurs, are also featured in the exhibition. For instance, the evolution of dinosaurs into chickens is another geochronological timespan compressed into the exhibition, featured in a video about the chickens who were hypnotized by the exactness of the lines of Mondrian. Nuur also uses magnetic rocks as process sculpture in the show and will exhibit recent definitive and relational works, including a reflector panel which has a million virtual faces defined by the flashlight of your smartphone.
The new chapter of Navid Nuur’s oeuvre complements his eye-dazzling visual universe and is still researching principal tactile, vocal, visual and conceptual ties between people and objects with DIY experiments, language games and paradoxes. MINING MEMORY is an exhibition that feeds from the past and prototypes the future, informed by the artist, who retrospectively seems to have been experimenting in the forge of his studio with abstract patternology, participatory acts and an almost undefinable use of materials, media and documentation much before Post-Internet art was on the rise.
The exhibition text was written by Budapest based writer and curator Áron Fenyvesi.
Navid Nuur, born 1976 in Tehran, works in The Hague. Previous solo exhibitions include Lube Love, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2014), TA-DA, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013), PHANTOM FUEL, Parasol unit, London (2013), HOCUSFOCUS, Matadero, Madrid (2012), POST PARALLELISM, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen (2011), THE VALUE OF VOID, Kunsthalle Fridericianum (2009). Previous group exhibitions include Allegory of the Cave Painting, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2014), Image into Sculpture, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013), Time, Trade and Travel, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012), Illuminations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011), IMAGE TO BE PROJECTED UNTIL IT VANISHES, Museion – Museum of modern and contemporary art, Bolzano (2011), Performative Attitudes, Kunsthaus Glarus (2010), and The History of Art, David Roberts Art Foundation London (2010).
