Selected works

Through installation, sound, performance and context-specific gestures, Abbas’ artworks fundamentally explore how personal and collective histories interweave; holding ajar the socio-politics that so often define modes of being today, making these more hospitable in turn.

exhibitions and projects

Shifting The Silence
Curated By, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (Austria), 2023

… In this new iteration of [his Ouranophobia SW3 exhibition], Zahedi uncovers the past lives of the gallery building, connecting us with different layers of space (the material and secular, but also atmospheric and psychological). Drawing from common materials and the therapeutic, spiritual, and meditative practices where sound facilitates the release of pain and grief, the work carries the potential for a more emotional attunement while opening multiple entryways into personal narratives. As Zahedi asks, referring to the Ouranophobia SW3 as signifying ‘fear of the sky’: ‘How do I develop a sense of place in the cosmos when all I can rely on is the ground beneath my feet?’. Staircases, exit signs, and floor tiles forming an arrow propose multiple exits. And yet, they bring us back to the same space where we began: at a ground level.
—Giulia Civardi, 2023

Holding a Heart in Artifice
Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (UK), 2023

Abbas Zahedi works with people and places to help process difficult emotions and histories. In Holding a Heart in Artifice, Zahedi combines visual and sensory elements to create space for conversation and shared experience. Under his guidance, a gallery can function as an emotional utility into which we are all implicated.

[…]

Holding a Heart in Artifice encourages us to think about interdependence; how art, audiences, workers, and artwork are all reliant on each other. By passing the palliative threshold of the gallery, visitors can connect to different realities and support systems, opening themselves up to cathartic and vulnerable conversations and understandings.

(read more about the exhibition here)

“Holding a Heart in Artifice” functioned first and foremost as a proposition of what a contemporary art institution in 2023 could entail: a creative environment that honors sustainability and positive risk-taking, engages a diverse audience and provides a communal safe space to gather, eat, drink, dance, heal, and share opinions on a host of current topics.
—Maximiliane Leuschner, TEXTE ZUR KUNST, 2023

Sonic Signals
Eastside Projects, Birmingham (UK), 2023

Sonic Signals is a proposal for a new form of open ended infrastructure; conflating and connecting a primary school, an after school radio club, and an artist-led multiverse.

Responding to the particularities of working with Eastside Projects and Chandos Primary School as an Incidental Artist, Abbas Zahedi has developed a site-sensitive concept that proposes a new kind of relationship between the two organisations, opening a portal between them through which a potentially infinite loop of audio can be transmitted. Messages made by children will move from the school into the gallery, where they will be played openly for everyone to hear.

(read more about the exhibition here)

WAITING WITH {SONIC SUPPORT}
Frieze Artist Award, Frieze London (UK), 2022

Waiting With {Sonic Support}, 2022, is a prototype for a new form of civic infrastructure. Conflating multiple sites – a bus stop, or public waiting area, a DIY bandstand and a public support space – Abbas’ architectural installation builds upon his critical interest in how difference is mediated. Specifically, this site-sensitive work responds to the particularities of Frieze London, activating its threshold, to establish a speculative transport system for utopian daydreaming; one that messes up arbitrary notions of inside and outside – of inclusion and exclusion. In this way, Waiting With {Sonic Support}, enacts utopian thinking by affording space to the possibilities that lie beyond monotonous stasis.

(watch Abbas speak about the project here)

Loading Loading (the inertia of practice)
Capc – Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (France), 2022-23

In 2022, the British artist Abbas Zahedi was invited by the CAPC, the Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, to intervene on the terraces of the museum, on the site of the work White Rock Line (1990) by Richard Long, which was temporarily uninstalled for restoration.

‘The installation White Rock Line (1990) by Richard Long is the starting point for Abbas Zahedi who, rather than concealing the presence of this work, marks its absence by installing a “ghost” signage with exact dimensions. from the intervention of Richard Long, taking the form of a loading bar – of the type that we are used to seeing on our screens. This gesture to signify the “expectation” of art, of the return of Richard Long’s work, but also to think about our relationship to the work of art in the museum and beyond.’
—Cédric Fauq

(read about the exhibition here)

Signs and Lemons
Belmacz, London (UK), 2022

Abbas’ work spans performance, sculpture, image making, video, installation and social enterprise. He draws upon personal experience and responds intuitively to specific spaces and commissions. He is inherently interested in process, as opposed to creating objects or outcomes and takes inspiration from the city in all its complexity. Signs and Lemons is a selection of editions that brings together themes that recur in his practice.
–Alison Crawshaw, 2022

(read more about the exhibition here)

Metatopia 10013
anonymous gallery, New York (USA), 2022

“I don’t feel like I can just create something static, because I’d find that really hard to justify. […] Even the seemingly static elements are an invitation for you to do something, as opposed to just being objects to look at.”
—Abbas Zahedi, 2022

(read the exhibition text here)

Brick Lane Foundation & Police Book Exchange
with Whitechapel Gallery and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (UK), 2021-22

Repurposed by Abbas Zahedi, the disused Police Station on Brick Lane becomes a space for social evaluation: the Brick Lane Foundation. Inspired by the processes of critique in art school, Zahedi highlights concerns around migrant histories and the gentrification of East London; by reframing the role of the police, as a force concerned with the feedback and feelings of local people.

(read the project’s text here)

This national project, initially staged at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2021 before travelling to Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art in 2022, the Police Book Exchange invited visitors to the exhibitions to donate or suggest books that they would like members of the police force to read, and vice versa. The aim was to create a form of dialogue between the police and the community, through the artist leveraging the gallery’s institutional voice – thus making an invitation from one public body to another.

(read the project’s text here)

11&1
Belmacz, London, 2021

“Abbas Zahedi’s practice does not merely renounce common-sense logics, for his is a praxis of disobedient curiosity in the face of mythologies made political. Citing the specificities of a place and fragments from times, Zahedi re-routes, or (p)re-makes, architectures of understanding in order to explore that which lies bleached by binary divisions. Drawing upon his own auto-bio-graphic roots Zahedi’s exhibition 11&1 pulls at the edges of a space, making the ‘commercial gallery’ uncanny and affective through his installation.”
—Toby Üpson, 2021

(read about the exhibition here)

Ouranophobia SW3
Chelsea Sorting Office, London, 2020-2021

“Visiting Zahedi’s show is like being enveloped in the warmth of a gently sorrowful song (think Reshma, Pathanay Khan, Big Thief, or The National). You are not sure of the lyrics but listening feels necessary. There is the compulsion to hit repeat; to linger and share in that sorrow some more.”
—Hammad Nasar, 2021

(read more about the exhibition here)

Somic Support Group
Chelsea Sorting Office, London, 2020-2021

Sonic Support Group is an interdisciplinary collaboration seeking to release the innate therapeutic potential within certain art exhibitions for NHS staff and frontline workers.

(read more about the project here)

How To Make A How From A Why?
South London Gallery, London, 2020

“There is something about this work as a whole and complete system – hand-pump/leaking-faucet/hand-towel. It requires the body of a viewer, not just to activate it, but it centres the body of its viewer into a primacy. You are the centre of a system, it functions because of your touch, presence and weight, the art work’s entire system serves you (the tender service of drying hands), and at the end it reaches its hand down and offers you an exit.”
—The White Pube, 2020

(read about the exhibition here)

Dwelling: In This Space We Grieve
MA Degree Show, Central Saint Martins, London (UK), 2019

“It may not be clear why I have chosen to install an empty bottle fridge, filled with the sounds of grief, as my final degree show piece. The premise of this work is to offer a libation, within a space where the serving and spilling of drinks is forbidden. For I am mourning the death of my neighbour, friend and colleague Khadija Saye; because I cannot be in this space without thinking of her. She was the one who brought me here two years ago, to see a previous version of this degree show and made me promise that I would join her as a prospective student; so that we could both graduate together in the summer of 2019. Yet I stand here alone today, because a few weeks after that fateful encounter, Khadija was killed in the fire of Grenfell Tower. A blaze that was apparently caused by the faultiness of an immigrant’s fridge.”
—Abbas Zahed, 2019

(read more about the work here)

Studio Jum’ah
Tate Modern, London (UK), 2018

Studio Jum’ah was a re-imagining of the muslim Friday prayer, as a site of contemporary art (Tate Modern, London) and knowledge production. In this performance gesture, aspects of the prayer relating to participation, structure, hierarchy and pedagogy were adjusted and reconfigured in light of the public institutional setting. Furthermore, this intervention interrogated the idea of a studio and gallery as sanctified spaces of post-enlightenment modernity; spaces which often function as socially-removed and exclusionary – especially when it comes to diasporic bodies of flesh and praxis.

(read more about the project here)

MANNA at the Diaspora Pavilion
57th Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, Venice (Italy), 2017

For the Diaspora Pavilion, Zahedi has produced MANNA (Machine Aided Neural Networking of Affect), a site-specific installation that interrogates the ways in which culture is consumed, shaped and appropriated in relation to technology and networking platforms. The acronym refers to a process of transformation, which he himself has undergone to cope with the affective outcomes of his predicament. Zahedi connects these ideas to the proliferation of artisanal food and drinks making, which he has adopted into his practice, as it links directly to the history of his family, who were ceremonial drinks makers in Iran.

(read more about the exhibition here)

publication and press

“ ” #07
a conversation between Eva Wilson and Abbas Zahedi, 2023

What happens when we think of the space of art as a living body? Abbas Zahedi became an artist by way of a medical education, a philosophy symposium in a chip shop, community organising, and “Dissociative Realism”, as described in an essay by Arsalan Isa. With Eva Wilson, Zahedi explores translation and transplantation as frameworks that allow us to understand ourselves in relation to others—as life-support systems to counter the erosion of identity through trauma.

ISBN : 978-88-8056-206-1
EAN : 9788880562061

Semi Rational Records of Artchievement
artist’s publication 2021

assembled on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition 11 & 1,
11 June 2021 Belmacz, London (UK).

select press and interviews

Review: HEARTBURN?, Maximiliane Leuschner, TEXTE ZUR KUNST, October 2023

Essay: Rooms We Leave Behind, Alessandro Rabottini, Mousse 82, 2023

Interview: Galleries for grieving, En Liang Kong, Financial Times, 2022

Essay: Frieze Artist Award, Eva Wilson, Frieze Week Magazine, 2022

Review (solo): Metatopia 10013, Kaleem Hawa, ARTFORUM, 2022

Interview: On the Rituals of Grieving, Jamila Prowse, FRIEZE, 2022

Essay: Dissociative Realism, Arsalan Isa, 2022

Press: Metatopia 10013, Anonymous, 2022

Essay: Abbas Zahedi: 11&1, Toby Upson, Belmacz, 2021

Review: Sonic Support Group, Roisin Tapponi, FRIEZE, 2021

Interview: To The Sour Sowers, The Mosaic Rooms, 2021

Interview: Fear of heaven, Kashif Sharma-Patel, AQNB, 2021

Review (solo): Ouranophobia SW3, Hammad Nasar, Ocula, 2021

Review (solo): Ouranophobia SW3, Chloe Carroll, Art Monthly, 2021

Interview: Ouranophobia SW3 (solo), Adam Hines-Green, 2020

Interview (video): South London Gallery (solo), 2020

Interview (audio): The Suite (212) Sessions with Juliet Jacques, 2020

Essay: Transactional Objects, Cedric Fauq, Mousse Magazine 71, 2020

Review (solo): How to Make a How from a Why?, The White Pube, 2020

Review: AMRA, Spike Island, Amy Grace, Bristol24/7, November 2019

Review: ME, MYSELF & A I I I (2017), Laura O’Leary, 2018

Interview: Jum’ah at the Tate: Abbas Zahedi, Amaliah.com, January 2018

Artist biography

Education. Abbas studied medicine at University College London, before completing his MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins in 2019.

Selected exhibitions. Air de repos (Breathwork), Capc Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France (2024-25); A time when the dogs barked every night, Woonhuis, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2024); Display, Ehrlich Steinberg, LA, USA (2024); Echopraxia, anonymous gallery, Mexico (2024); shifting the silence, GIANNI MANHATTAN, Vienna, Austria (2023); Holding Space, Hauser & Wirth, London, UK (2023); Holding a Heart in Artifice, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2023); Divided Selves, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, UK (2023); Horror in the Modernist Block, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2022-23); Waiting With {Sonic Support}, Frieze Art Fair London, London, UK (2022); LOADING LOADING (the inertia of practice), CAPC, contemporary art museum of Bordeaux, France (2022-23); Metatopia 10013, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); The London Open 2022, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2022); Beuys Open Source, Belmacz, London, UK (2021-2022); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2022); Temporary Compositions, Gallery 31 Somerset House, London, UK (2021); Yarmonics 2021, Great Yarmoth, UK (2021); D.E.VALUATION, Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier, France (2021); 11 & 1, Belmacz, London, UK (2021); Governmental Fires, FUTURA, Prague (2021); In Hindsight…, Bladr, Copenhagen, Denmark (2020); Ouranophobia SW3, Chelsea Sorting Office, London, UK (2020);  How To Make A How From A Why?, Fire Station, South London Gallery, London, UK (2020); B, Belmacz, London, UK (2019); Degree Show, Central Saint Martins, London, UK (2019); The Age of New Babylon, Lethaby Gallery, London, UK (2018); Diaspora Pavilion, (ICF), Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, UK (2018); appetite, Apiary Studios, London, UK (2018); Diaspora Pavilion, (ICF), Palazzo Pisani a Santa Marina, Venice, Italy (2017);rb&hArts, Royal Brompton Hospital, London, UK (2008).

Selected interventions, projects and performances. NOCTURN [3]: it’s your turn to be, 17 Little Portland Street, London, UK (2024); Para-Phrase, Pushkin House, London, UK (2024); Always Coming Home, Matt’s Gallery, London, UK (2024); The Drop Out: Tell Them I Said No, E-WERK Luckenwalde, Luckenwalde, Germany (2024); CRISIS, Bold Tendencies, London, UK (2023); Sonic Signals, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (2022-2023); Age of Many Posts, Barbican, London (2022); Frieze Artist Award commission, London, (2022); Sonic Support Group, with Neurofringe (2020 – ongoing); Radio Amnion, Technical University of Munich (2021); Becontree Forever, Create London (2021); Brick Lane Foundation, Whitechapel Gallery (2021); A Case of Med(dling)tation, Performance Exchange at Belmacz (2021); To The Sour Sowers, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2021); The Urgency of The Arts Assembly, Royal College of Art (2021); Soul Refresher, Brent Biennial, London Borough of Culture (2020); Long Table: Lament, South London Gallery (2020); AMRA, Spike Island, Bristol (2019); Rose & STEMM, Guest Projects, London (2019); Outset Grant Ceremony, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); The Boulevard, Tate Britain, London (2018); Studio Jum’ah, Tate Exchange, London (2018); #FakeBooze, Diaspora Pavilion, Venice (2017).

Awards. Abbas has been the recipient of numerous awards including, the 2024-25 Stanley Picker Fellowship, the Frieze Artist Award (2022); the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists (2021); the Serpentine Galleries’ Support Structures for Support Structures (2021); Artangel, Thinking Time (2020); Jerwood Arts Bursary (2019); Aziz Foundation Academic Scholarship (2018); and Khadijah Saye Memorial Fund Scholarship (2017).

Abbas is an associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art (London), as well as teaching at universities across the UK and abroad.