A group exhibition by Iranian and Iranian-American artists, Afsoon Amirian, Armin Amirian, Naser Azizi, Kamran Diba, Hossein Edalatkhah, Renée Fox, Amir Habibabadi, Alborz Kazemi, Hamed Khosravi, Farshido Larimian, Negin Mahzoun, Omid Majidinejad, Ardeshir Mohasses, Mani Mazinani, Sanaz Mazinani, Nazanin Parviz, Reza Rostampisheh, Bahar Sabzevari, Semco Salehi, Kamran Sharif, Javid Tafazoli, Rojin Shafiei, and Tooraj Khameneh Zadeh, has opened its doors to visitors at the Lodge Gallery until May 22.
Narges Hamzianpour is the curator of the exhibit entitled “My Very Favourite Things”.
Hamzianpour is an Iranian - American art market expert and consultant with a focus on the art of the Middle East. Currently residing in Los Angeles, she has worked with multiple international galleries and art fairs. Hamzianpour has established and cultivated collections for a large roster of emerging, mid-career and renowned Middle Eastern and Iranian artists in museums, galleries, and numerous private collectors.
The statement also added, "For the last year, many of us have been quite stationary and confined to our homes. The home or the spaces we reside in are a substitute vessel for the soul. The architecture protects and nourishes us, the interior objects distinguish and identify us. We signal our interior selves in their furnishings. The mis en scene - Hamzianpour's curation creates an intimate environment within the gallery. The works of these 21 artists from multiple artistic disciplines invite the viewer to stay and perhaps explore in an unorthodox fashion.
Covid pandemic has deprived us of this immediate means of access to the world or at least forces us to envisage it in new ways. The glamour of travel across the globe, the cosmopolitan sociability and consumption, in their many forms, of the world's great metropolises, have given way to an urgent need to rethink intimate space, both in terms of its physical character, and the human relations it comprises. Cultural and social diversity is becoming a rare resource, leading us to question its place in our lives: on the one hand, its great richness, and on the other, the new frontiers it imposes on us.
Under lockdown, a new temporality is emerging, in which objects around us sometimes play a primordial role, forming at times a harmonious symphony, at others a deafening racket that blows the whistle on solitude. Drawing together in one place works and pathways from diverse worlds, the exhibition 'My Very Favorite Things' invites us to think about ways of arranging our personal space, By 'locking diversity down' within a domestic setting, cut off from the wide world's vast spaces, it questions our notions of cosmopolitanism, with the moral obligation it carries of trying to understand the 'other', but also the tendency it implies to 'collect' things and relationships.”