Arash Nassiri (b. 1986, Tehran, Iran) invited us to his Berlin studio, where he has been based since 2023. He is a laureate of the Berlin Program for Artists.
His practice focuses on video and sculptural installations. He interweaves mass culture, vernacular practices, and historical references. He presented us the project he is currently working on following his residency at the Villa Albertine. The central figure is an insect puppet who invades Iranian diaspora villas in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles.
This project reveals the story of this architectural style invented in LA in the 1990s, which was banned in 2008. The layered artistic influences in these palatial structures pay tribute to an Iranian bourgeois aesthetic, itself shaped by 17th-century French decorative traditions. They embody a desire to reconstruct a lost heritage of prestige through the act of home-making abroad, while incorporating Western domestic standards, demonstrating a certain economic wealth. These “forbidden” houses built by a diaspora are seen through the eyes of an invasive insect - often not allowed in a house. This forms a “mise en abyme” of displacement and the longing to establish a home, and questions the social status of cultural artifacts.
His untitled installation, which was presented as part of the Berlin Program for Artists (BPA) 2024 exhibition, uses Sylvanians dollhouses, whose design imitates the style of English cottages, although they are manufactured and distributed by a Japanese toy brand. These tiny doll houses are transformed into ghostly scale models. On the facades, miniature replicas of LED animation panels relay advertising messages in Persian. Here, Nassiri highlights this Iranian popular practice that develops its own visual language. By displacing these fragments of Tehran nightscape into an art place, he introduces junk imagery that is supposed to be low quality in the setting of an institution where the public gaze has to evaluate the quality of the works.
What emerges is a dialogue between heterogeneous spheres: the memorial landscape of childhood, the visual code of advertising, and the discursive space of global contemporary art.