"In Arash Nassiri's new moving-image commission, an insect puppet drags itself across an empty marble floor, cast in eerie blue evening light. The scene is diffused through an enormous frosted-glass cubicle, refracting and distorting the images. That sense of distortion pervades the Tehran-born, Berlin-based Nassiri's first institutional solo exhibition, A Bug's Life, which opened last weekend at London's Chisenhale Gallery-and comprises a film set within a sculptural installation."
"Existing in the "bubble" of the Iranian community, the builders of these houses in Los Angeles "were trying to belong to American culture, but they got cut off from it, in terms of culture and taste", Nassiri says. By recreating their own taste, they opened up a contradiction between their history as Iranians, their lives as Americans, and their Western-influenced understanding of Modernity. Nassiri finds that contradiction "beautiful", he says-and reminiscent of how Iran and the West have "mimicked but also rejected each other"."
A moving-image commission features an insect puppet dragging across an empty marble floor in eerie blue evening light, diffused through a vast frosted-glass cubicle that refracts and distorts images. The film is presented within a sculptural installation and follows the insect through a cavernous Los Angeles mansion, with scenes evoking disorientation and ambiguity that mirror separation from homeland. The mansion exemplifies a "Persian Palace," a hybrid of Iranian and French Empire styles that proliferated during Iran's 1960s–70s oil wealth and were later recreated in Los Angeles by diaspora communities. These recreated houses reveal contradictions between Iranian history, American life, and Western-influenced Modernity and are being documented as many are demolished.
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