An artist talk by Abbas Akhavan
5:00 p.m., Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Coach House, Green College, and livestreamed
6201 Cecil Green Park Road, University of British Columbia
greencollege.ubc.ca
Join visual artist Abbas Akhavan as he discusses some of his most significant works to date, particularly those focused on animals, ruins, and gardens. Akhavan’s practice ranges across site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture, and performance. The direction of his research has been deeply influenced by the specificity of the sites in which he works, including the architectures that house them, the economies that surround them, and the individuals that frequent them. The concept of the garden—and, by extension, the spaces and species just outside the home, such as the backyard, public parks, and other domesticated landscapes—have been foundational components in his work. In recent large-scale installations, Akhavan recreates cultural sites affected by international conflicts, attending to the multivalent ways in which ongoing geopolitics fight for control of historical narratives. Through his work, Akhavan engages with formal, material, and social legacies that shape the boundaries between public and private, domesticated and wild, hostile and hospitable.
Abbas Akhavan’s (b. 1977, Tehran, Iran; lives/works: Montreal and Berlin) received an MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2006), and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2004). Upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include La Biennale di Venezia, Canada Pavilion (2026); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2026); Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2025); Bangkok Kunsthalle (2025); Copenhagen Contemporary and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (2023). He is the recipient of the Fellbach Triennial Award (2017); Sobey Art Award (2015); Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014); and the Berliner Kunstpreis (2012).
Akhavan will represent Canada at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, and his work will be shown at the Belkin in the upcoming exhibition Abbas Akhavan: One Hundred Years from September 5 to December 7, 2025.
Presented as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, co-sponsored with Green College and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
Image: Abbas Akhavan, curtain call, variations on a folly, 2021/2023, barley straw, subsoil, lightweight Leca, sharp sand, puddle clay, wood, Chroma Key green paint, pink noise, 390 x 650 x 1230 cm. Photo: David Stjernholm; courtesy of the artist.
