Ali Ahadi (b. Tehran, Iran. 1984) is an Iranian-Canadian Vancouver based artist and writer. His interdisciplinary practice spans from site-specific ephemeral installations to sculpture, photo and video-based works, writing and translation.

Consisting of representational images, videos, composite objects and texts, that propose certain ways of approaching conceptual dualities, Ahadi’s work is constituted through addressing the problems of presentation and representation, monsteration and demonstration, and, finally, the relationships between aesthetics and contingent forms of abstractions that are irreducible to the conventional artistic determination.

In Ahadi’s work, the artistic is contingent and thus, may happen, not within the aestheticized presence, rather through the creation of particular situations in which the heterogeneity of multiple dualities induces the transformation of an informe into a new form.

Ahadi’s doctoral research devises two new models for a critical approach to historical and contemporary issues in art, politics, and philosophy. These models are “Thought-Activism” and the “Visitor”. Thought-activism is a strategic and an ontological approach to the categories of “language” and “seeing” concerning the formation of a mutually inclusive account for “action” and “thought”, i.e., acting contingent upon thought, and thinking if and only if acting. In short, thought-activism is to be thought of as where the question of “what is to be done?” is bound with that of “what is to be thought?” and vice versa. The subject-figure of the Visitor is a reconfiguration of the category of the art spectator and of the art audience into the encountering subject position of the art Visitor

Ahadi is an internationally exhibited artist. His last solo exhibition, Shit Yes Academy (Goh Ballet Academy) was held at the Ag Galerie of Tehran, Iran. He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on continental philosophy from the University of British Columbia, where he previously received his MFA from in visual arts in 2012.