Abbas Akhavan’s practice involves a receptive contextualisation of the sites and architectures within which his installations are located; the institutions, economies, visitorship or communities surrounding, experiencing, or being experienced by his work. Akhavan is interested in domestic spaces, such as the home, the backyard and the garden, and the fluctuation between two polarities: hospitality and hostility. The artist often considers his work ‘studies’, pointing both to the works ephemerality and their unfinished, unfulfilled nature. His work asks the question, what do we assign as suitable sites for cultural production? In so doing, Akhavan’s installations often have the appearance of theatre or film sets, spaces ready to be activated, perhaps by a performance. In recent years, Akhavan’s research and installations have explored the relationship between two disparate materials of production: chroma key green screen technology and cob, a building material made of water, subsoil and straw that dates back to prehistoric times. In Akhavan’s installations, the chroma key green acts almost as a transtemporal portal, highlighting the cob structures’ appearance as signifiers, anachronistic, evoking another time or place. ...
