Modules. Sirous Namazi
11 April – 17 May 2009 

 

Lunds konsthall Production is a three-year project featuring younger artists from our own region. The basic idea is to offer them the possibility to produce and present new works. The exhibition Modules. Sirous Namazi is the second instalment of this series, inaugurated in the spring of 2008 with a presentation by the artist Luca Frei.

Sirous Namazi’s art may be situated in a wide field of three-dimensional expression, encompassing larger sculptures as well as smaller objects, but he also works actively with other artistic formats such as drawing and photography. His works are visually forceful and convincing. They are always executed with razor-sharp precision and an unfailing sense of scale.

Although it might seem controlled and well balanced at first, Sirous Namazi’s art opens up to readings that go far beyond the formal and secure. His own experience of conquering new languages and forms of expression allows him to visualise boundaries towards what is insecure and unsafe in our contemporary reality. He consciously refers to art history, to architecture, spatiality and social planning, but his art is just as much about demolishing and undermining as about constructing and building.

Modules. Sirous Namazi comprises several newer works, two of which have been specially produced for Lunds konsthall. In the front hall visitors are greeted by the large sculpture Fragment (2009), suspended from the high ceiling. The permeable ’architectural’ construction is composed of prefabricated metal beams from the building industry. The tubular lights included in the structure expand it into a light fixture that radiates frailty and displacement despite the generous proportions. Version (2009), another hanging sculpture, is executed as a model, twenty times smaller than the imagined original. Here spatial notions overlap, hinting at fading memories of what might once have been home.

The exhibition also includes the drawing series Untitled (2009), which must be considered a sketch for the two new works. Moreover, it comprises the two-part wall object Untitled (Modules) (2009), the floor sculpture Container II (2008) and the photographic series Interior (2007). These works allow us to sample Sirous Namazi’s different approaches in recent years, and they become a thematic and formal counterpoint to the newly produced pieces.

Sirous Namazi was born in Kerman in Iran 1970, grew up in Lund and lives in Stockholm. He studied at the Forum Art School in Malmö 1993–95 and at the Malmö Art Academy 1995–98. He represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale 2007.

The exhibition series Lunds konsthall Production is realised with generous support from Sweden’s Future Culture Foundation.