Shahpour Pouyan will be participating in his first UK solo exhibition at Copperfield gallery in London, UK, which opens on 23 September and runs until 13 November, 2015.
Shahpour Pouyan: History Travels At Different Speeds explores the concept of parallel trajectories that exist in history; things concealed under an overwhelming narrative of power and reform, tumult and prosperity. On display are 20 new works that Pouyan has made for the exhibition: a series of infamous Persian miniatures stripped of their central figures in an attempt to coax the unspoken from their backgrounds.
History appears to travel at different speeds depending on our points of perspective. By the Gregorian year 2010, the Iranian Calendar found itself lingering at 1389. This year saw the middle class citizens of Tehran brutally repressed. Sometimes anger was swallowed and everything returned to normal, at other times the people retaliated, batons were seized and became signs of victory.
While in 1389 reformers were beaten in Iran, in Europe the Gregorian year 1389 saw the culmination of the reign of Pope Urban VI. Elected with the desire to reform the clergy, Urban VI’s reign was characterized by a programme of violence against those thought to have been conspiring against him, people were imprisoned at will and brutally mistreated. Pouyan’s work Memorial Cross for Pope Urban VI draws an uncomfortable parallel between these histories.
