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Artist: Navid Nuur

Navid Nuur’s exhibition brings together new productions and recent iterations of the artist’s serial projects in a study of perceptual elasticity: of how eye and mind negotiate displacement or reversal, of how attention and affect respond to objects that seem to be in the wrong place, or seen from the wrong angle.
 

Navid Nuur’s exhibition brings together new productions and recent iterations of the artist’s serial projects in a study of perceptual elasticity: of how eye and mind negotiate displacement or reversal, of how attention and affect respond to objects that seem to be in the wrong place, or seen from the wrong angle.
 






A&N&D is both title of the show and a user’s guide of sorts: a model for visual and mental processes where connections arise out of connections, and formal or interpretive correlations unfold in concentric circles. One imagines that a phrase in which “a&n&d” would function as conjunction would be interrupted – or perhaps structured – by moments of reverie, slowed down by pauses for breath, unforeseen ramifications and parentheses devoted to what its words might obscure or elide. Similarly, the “phrase” of this exhibition is articulated as a sequence of feedback and feed-ahead, folding together what its components mean and their physical or sensuous charge.

A photograph having at its centre the entrance to a cave – a mouth of flickering darkness that Nuur describes as the prehistoric experience of the monochrome – is first laser-cut in wood and then cast in bronze, so that material, technical and representational components revolve around the blackness of the geological recess, the colour and shape of negative space: an abyss Nuur’s representational strategies outline, only to become indistinguishable, lost in it. Another work functions as a display case for left-overs from the artist’s studio, composing a picture out of all that his other pictures did not necessitate (or have produced as debris), and commenting wryly on the notion of remainder, as that which falls off the register of art or is unable to carry the true expression of a self. Similar preoccupations are engaged from a different angle in a work that features a vase holding fresh flowers. Nuur’s ceramic vase is glazed with the rest of the rest: the glaze incorporates ash collected from facilities that incinerate waste from the city of Berlin. That which an urban metabolism expels, the very stuff of collective indifference and anonymity, is twice transmuted via fire and employed as the distinctive visual sign of the work.

A painting is executed with Vitamin D mixed with water, in a manner that suggests a mechanical dispersal of liquid, rather than the manifestation of a personal pictorial style. As Vitamin D is produced in the body when the skin is exposed to sunlight, the “skin” of this painting can be said to have reacted to the very light that exists between itself and the viewer, to assimilate the conditions of luminosity and intelligibility that allow it to exist. A&N&D builds up intriguing simultaneities – seeing one object through another and the middle through the sides – and zigzagging correspondences between perceptual alertness and its hazy limits; it knots together margins, backsides and oblique glances, the actual and metaphorical borders of the space of the exhibition.

– Mihnea Mircan, 2016

Navid Nuur was born 1976 in Teheran and currently lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands. Nuur studied at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and Plymouth University. His work was presented in several solo and group exhibitions at international institutions, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Art Stations Foundation, Poznan (both 2016); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Kiel, Kiel; Bienal de la Habana, Havana (all 2015); DCA Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee; Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest (both 2014); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Parasol Unit, London (both 2013); Matadero, Madrid (2012); Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen and La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (both 2011). Nuur's works form part of renowned collections, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; S.M.A.K., Ghent and Koç, Istanbul.