Shirana Shahbazi: First Things First

The KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art is presenting the first comprehensive retrospective in Berlin of Shirana Shahbazi. The artist, who was born in 1974 in Teheran (Iran), came to Germany in 1985 and now lives in Zurich.

The exhibition shows a representative selection of photographs from very different series that were created in the past ten years. With some 35 works, it distills this spectrum into a visual cosmos of pictures that develops beyond categories such as stylistic similarity and logical temporal sequences. The exhibition First Things First emphasises an equal juxtaposition, a dynamic and free arrangement of various subjects and styles: unspectacular landscapes alongside precisely staged fruit and flower still lifes, seemingly casual urban scenes alongside geometric, abstract compositions in deliberately chosen colour. Shahbazi’s works often go through processes of transformation that emphasise not least the intended production of pictures. For instance, this is the case when the artist translates pictures from a trip from Zurich to Tehran into two-tone lithographic prints, or when she builds precise spatial objects with coloured panels, only to transfer them into an apparently abstract geometric photographic surface.

The viewer must continually refocus his or her gaze in order to read the pictures in their equal juxtapositions, but also to understand them as enigmatic fragments that not only reveal, but also conceal. With her pictures, Shirana Shahbazi takes up the visual spectrum of the present and transforms it into a semantic complexity that cannot be achieved through classifications and formal categories. These pictures insist on a necessary openness that is demanded unconditionally and seeks out and withstands the pluralist, equal juxtaposition. This basic openness is underscored by the specifically chosen exhibition architecture in the Power House M2 at the KINDL, which allows neither for a prescribed route through the exhibition nor for intended viewing angles.

The exhibition title First Things First means nothing less than “everything.” It does not point to a valuing prioritisation, but ironically stirs up false expectations in order to more clearly emphasise the contradiction of hierarchical categorisations and thus Shahbazi’s basic artistic interests.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Sternberg Press.

The exhibition is curated by Andreas Fiedler.

Shirana Shahbazi (b. 1974 in Teheran) came to Germany in 1985 and studied photography from 1995 to 2000 in Dortmund and Zurich. She has had extensive solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern (2014), the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2011), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2008), and the Barbican Art Gallery in London (2007), among others. She has also participated in important group exhibitions at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2012), the Kunsthaus Zurich (2008), and the Venice Biennale (2003). She now lives in Zurich.

Press contact: Denhart v. Harling, dh [​at​] segeband.de / T +49 179 4963497