Sahand Hesamiyan: Prolepsis

28th September 3rd November, 2023
  • SAHAND HESAMIYAN

     

    PROPLESIS

  • The Third Line is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition with Sahand Hesamiyan. Marking the artist’s 24-year journey with steel, Prolepsis will showcase a collection of sculptures that celebrate his dedication to this medium, and shine a light on a trove of long-cherished yet unrealised projects.
  • Latent Potency: The Speculative Power of Sahand Hesamiyan’s Sculptures

    Kevin Jones
  • The unrealized artist project has an eerie appeal. It tugs at what was (an idea, an impression) and shines a...
    Installation view, Sahand Hesamiyan, Prolepsis, 2023, The Third Line. Photo credit Ismail Noor, Seeing Things Studio 

    The unrealized artist project has an eerie appeal. It tugs at what was (an idea, an impression) and shines a light on what could be, evoking actions and processes that hover, suspended, incomplete. For many years, a curatorial fascination with the unrealized work has bubbled through artist interviews, exhibitions, catalogues, and critical writings. This curiosity for the ‘work that never was’ famously crystalized in the sole recurring question that curator/critic Hans Ulrich Obrist asked artists in his numerous interviews, prompting them to reveal (in speech, at least) the unseen, like peering into some idea abyss. The question of how to visualize the odd tangle of latency/potency held within the unrealized project came to a provocative head in the e-flux/Serpentine Gallery exhibition The Agency of Unrealized Projects (daadgalerie, Berlin, 2012). The gallery space became an archive: filing cabinets lining the walls behind a counter were manned by employees who would retrieve project-specific folders based on visitors’ requests. Within the folder, a dossier of an unrealized work detailed its stalled genesis, partial expression, or contingent execution. This ‘consultative’ mechanism added a further layer of distance between the intention of the works and their tangible future, as if they were embedded even more deeply into the coils of an intermittently accessible memory. 

  • Sahand Hesamiyan has chosen to open his memory, rather than sequester it. Prolepsis is a walk-through of five projects that...
    Sahand Hesamiyan, Pillars of Victory, 2023, Steel Mo40 Steel 45 Rockwell Hardness, Two Pieces, 45 x 11 x 11 cm, 37 x 9.7 x 9.7 cm, Edition of 3, 2AP

    Sahand Hesamiyan has chosen to open his memory, rather than sequester it. Prolepsis is a walk-through of five projects that were cancelled or curtailed for a variety of reasons–Covid, geopolitical angst, revolutionary eruptions. Some were intended for high-profile institutional shows such as Epic Iran at London’s V&A, whose ambitions were recalibrated during the pandemic; others were intended for Tehran gallery exhibitions, waylaid by protests reacting to the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini. Frequently navigating both succinct gallery spaces and sprawling public squares, Hesamiyan excels in the large-scale, the quasi-monumental, consistently integrating components of Iranian architectural heritage, both sacred and triumphant. The table-top works in Prolepsis flirt with their own dormant monumentality: the scale markings on each table arouse a sense of what their full-blown heft might be, while the dramatic spot-lighting seems to nudge the pieces into a looming grandeur. Yet we are reminded of their liminal status–between a work and the work–by the candidness of the deliberately non-plinth worktable, as if the artistic process might resume once visitors have departed. 

     

  • "While it is true that the works in Prolepsis contain the DNA of unrealized projects, they hold a power far more potent than mere intention, than some embryonic signpost of an imagined outcome."

    While it is true that the works in Prolepsis contain the DNA of unrealized projects, they hold a power far more potent than mere intention, than some embryonic signpost of an imagined outcome. They are eminently self-referential[1], harking back to the very process from which they sprang. Hesamiyan shows us the murky area of creation—the zoomed-in joinery, the projected material and finishing, the intricacy of receding muqarnas. ‘Maquette’ seems insufficient as a descriptor, relying as it does on conjecture, on a ‘might happen.’  Equally, ‘prototype’ is bogged down in testing and hypotheses. Hesamiyan’s works are narratives in their own right, less beholden to the ‘final’ work, more jockeying between inception and conclusion. The rhetorical device of prolepsis, from which the show slyly takes its title, foregrounds this movement. Commonly known as a ‘flash-forward’ (the temporal counterpart of flashback), prolepsis is an anticipation: it represents an inexistent thing as existing, from within the moment of speaking. Time is collapsed, and the narration fills the void. Hesaminyan’s works in Prolepsis repeatedly leap between this moment of speech (the work made manifest), back to a shadowy genesis, and forward to an inexistent existence. This is a complex dance; one he has never shown us before. 

  • Unlike the blueprint-meets-diary meanderings stuffed into the folders at the Agency of Unrealized Projects, these works venture into the limelight....
    Sahand Hesamiyan, Kayhan, 2023, Steel Mo40 Steel 45 Rockwell Hardness, 28.4 x 40.7 x 16 cm, Edition of 3, 2AP
    Unlike the blueprint-meets-diary meanderings stuffed into the folders at the Agency of Unrealized Projects, these works venture into the limelight.  Pillars of Victory (2023) and Neshaan (2023) stand proud for viewers to snake between. Reclining works like Kanoon (2020) and Kayhan (2023) are no less charismatic. This affirmative stake-claiming (as artworks) propels them into a curious limbo: they are not really unrealized, yet they harbinger works that are. As such, they occupy a tricky terrain in which they are like latent guides, purporting to hold the code of the ‘true’ work to come. But what can this truth be? The artist’s real material in this show is perhaps less steel, but rather the slippages between concrete reality and hazy projection. Imagine one of the large-scale works is, one day, commissioned. Will these works be summoned as the hallmarks of executional truth, as faithful bearers of the generative ideal? More interestingly, though, Hesamiyan seems to be saying that the interest of these smaller works lies precisely in the desire for the larger works never to realize themselves. Like genetic strands, they concentrate all the covert deviations, anomalies, and eccentricities into their cores. Truth is moot: the works’ value is not their ability to herald exactitude, but to question it.  

     

    Ultimately, one could argue that nothing is fully realized until it is shown; that only engagement with the public completes a work. In this respect, Prolepsis is both an opportunity and a relief. These are Hesamiyan’s fantasies, his imaginings of how the monumental works could look, be executed, and installed. Like many fantasies, they were obsessive. The artist relates having returned to the works–and to the ideas for the works—repeatedly. As if caught in some Sisyphean loop, Hesamiyan confides to longing for a release from the cycle of continually revisiting the unfinished. Prolepsis is that release, of both mind and hand. It catalyzes not just a vitalized narrative of genesis and completion, but also a new form of artistic agency—one that revels in speculative power.

  • [1] I remember a 2016 visit to Hesamiyan’s Tehran studio and a small sculpture lying atop a worktable I had discovered accidentally. Nail (2012) was a slice of metal folded to resemble a nail—a sharp, spike of a statement. It struck me how this work was talking about itself, its own imbrication in a process of creating sculpture that is, ultimately, itself. 
  • Worklist

  • About Sahand Hesamiyan

    Born in 1977 in Tehran, Sahand Hesamiyan holds a Bachelor of Sculpture from the University of Tehran. The artist's versatile practice is informed by a profound understanding of construction techniques, culminating in larger than life metal sculptures and small elaborate works on paper. By creating interactive pieces that eclipse the mere repetition and reflection of thesetraditional forms, Hesamiyan is able to convey his acute technical abilities while taking inspiration from years of craftsmanship and historical concepts.

     

    Embracing the close ties between geometry, mythology, and philosophy, Hesamiyan is focused on extracting traditional elements from these ancient sciences and adapting them for the present and future. His explorations often manifest in the formof complex sculptures, whether they be freestanding objects or multifaceted wall installations. As a master of designing structural systems, Hesamiyan reinterprets Yazdibandi and Rasmibandi which are historic design methods utilized in the interior ornamentation of domes in Persian architecture.

     

    Selected solo exhibitions include: Far Side, Emrooz Gallery, Isfahan, Iran (2022); Majaz, BLOK Art Space at Cukurcuma and Buyuk Valide Han, Istanbul (2017); Frame Reference, Dastan Outside the Basement, Tehran, Iran (2015); Tavizeh, Dastan’sBasement, Tehran, Iran (2015); Khalvat, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2014); Sulook, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2013);Memory Lives On, Aun Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2011); Do You See Me!, Ave Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2008).

     

    Sahand’s work is included in important private and public collections, including: the Delfina Entrecanales Collection, Imago Mundi – Luciano Benetton Collection, The Samawi Collection and MAC.

  • About Kevin Jones

    Kevin Jones is a brand and content strategist, arts writer, and educator who is interested in the self-representational strategies of art practitioners in the MEASA region, specifically the ways in which they write about their practices. 

     

    New York-born and Paris-bred, Kevin has lived in the Middle East for the past seventeen years, serving as UAE Desk Editor for the magazine ArtAsiaPacific, while contributing criticism both internationally (The Art NewspaperArtforumArtReview and FlashArt International) and regionally. As an educator, he taught as part of Art Jameel’s Hayy Learning initiative for emerging Saudi artists in Jeddah in December 2019, and has been a faculty member at Dubai-based non-profit Tashkeel from 2015 to 2021. 

     

    Kevin holds a BA with a double major English Literature/Journalism from Northwestern University. His MA is in Linguistics/Semiotics from La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III).

     

    He is currently Director of Strategy at Alserkal Initiatives.