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.

In the summer of 2022, Abbas Zahedi was named the winner of the 2022 Frieze Artist Award. Realized in partnership with Forma, the Frieze Artist Award provides an emerging artist with the platform to debut an ambitious new commission on the occasion of Frieze London (October 12-16, 2022). For his commission, Abbas developed a new site-sensitive, installation-based, work that abound the static logic of the international art fair.

Re-working Jean-Paul Sartre’s metaphorical use of bus stops in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960),  Abbas’ intention for this project was to give sensorial form to the utopian possibilities of waiting in public. For Sartre, the bus stop can be seen as a site to ‘achieve practical and theoretical participation in common being;’ a dreamful place to meet and go forth into some kind of a common social utopia. But, as he suggests, the utopian potentials of these sites often become co-opted, stilled, by a ‘Right Bank’ rigidity. That is, they become places through which one becomes ‘prefabricated,’ trapped in the ‘plurality of isolations’ associated with the binary thinking that produced systems of domination, be they political or psychosocial.

For Abbas, the physical site of a bus stop can be thought of as a shelter, a meeting point, a forum, a place that is part of an imaginal network, a method of leaving and returning to the ends. In this way, the bus stop – or any public waiting area – is more than a place of rigid stasis, it is a site of immanence in which time gains new meaning again and again, particularly through new rituals of mediated dissociation; rituals such as listening to a song or a podcast, updating one’s feed, or playing a virtual game. Developed from this perspective, Abbas revisited Sartre’s search for ‘theoretical participation in common being,’ using this theoretical line to consider the potentials of an art to serve as a utopian station; literally a point of, and indeed for, departure, one grass-roots and pedestrian.

Echoing the forms of Central Asian Soviet-Era bus stops, the two structures that constitute Waiting With {Sonic Support} were placed on either side of the Frieze London threshold. With one structure placed under the oak trees of Regent’s Park and the second housed inside the Frieze London tent, around the booths that compose the fair, Abbas’ aim was not only to activate the physical threshold – the inside/outside division  – of the art fair but to critically address ideas of artistic value so often associated with international events of this type. That is, the valuable ‘in’ art(ists) and the valueless ‘out’ art(ists).

To activate these thresholds (inside/outside, valued/valueless – these two structures became stops in a performative network. As the fair unfolded, Abbas convened a daily open mic set, the sounds from which were broadcast from the performance space (the roofed structure situated outside in Regent’s Park) online and importantly to the second, civic structure (the seating structure) based inside the tent. Selected through a public submissions process, these open mics sets not only provided artists and performers not represented in the art fair to be part of this international art event but alluded to Abbas’ early creative practice as an emcee, spoken-word poet and community organiser. With each of the performers being gifted a ticket to Frieze London, this simple activation dissolved the physical division between differing bodies established by the event. Further, by providing a space for free, perhaps utopian, expression and conviviality under the trees of Regent’s Park, this activation critically rewound the logic that positions the valuable inside and the valueless outside of this ‘tented’ community; setting in motion the possibilities of an art to become a tool for some utopian becoming.

Watch Abbas talking about the project here

Press for Waiting With {Sonic Support}

En Liang Khong (2022), Artist Abbas Zahedi: I hijack galleries as spaces to grieve. Financial Times

Charlotte Jansen (2022), Abbas Zahedi: Meet the former doctor and MC who is this year’s Frieze Artist Award winner. The Art Newspaper

Eva Wilson (2022), Abbas Zahedi Invites Us To Play the Waiting Game. Frieze

Artist biography

Abbas Zahedi (b. 1984, London, UK), studied medicine at University College London, before completing his MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins in 2019.

Abbas’s interdisciplinary practice blends contemporary philosophy, poetics, and social dynamics with sound, sculpture, and other performative media. With an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave, rather than differ, Abbas seeks to makes connections with those around, in proximity to, or involved with the particular situations upon which he focuses. With an approach that nurtures the multiple specificities of the sites and situations he finds himself working with and in, Abbas often invites others into an ongoing conversation. And, it is by accentuating these moments that his practice is enunciated.

Selected exhibitions and projects: Loading Loading (the inertia of practice), CAPC, contemporary art museum of Bordeaux, France (2022); Metatopia 10013, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); Associate Artist: Postwar Modern, Barbican, London (2022); The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); Brick Lane Foundation, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021);  Becontree Forever, Create London (2021); To The Sour Sowers, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2021); 11 & 1, Belmacz, London (2021); D·E·VALUATION, Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète, France (2021); Governmental Fires, FUTURA, Prague (2021); Sonic Support Group, Chelsea Sorting Office, London (2020 – ongoing); Ouranophobia SW3, Chelsea Sorting Office (2020); How To Make A How From A Why?, South London Gallery (2020); In Hindsight…, Bladr, Copenhagen (2020); An Alternative Map of the Universe, ICF x Guest Projects, London (2019); The Age of New Babylon, Lethaby Gallery, London (2018); The Boulevard, Tate Britain, London (2018); Studio Jum’ah, Tate Exchange, London (2018); Diaspora Pavilion, (ICF), Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2018); Standing Block, Burlington Camden, Lincoln Projects, London (2017); Diaspora Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2017); BARBEDOUN, via Square Root Soda Works, London (2015 – 2017).

Abbas has been the recipient of a number of awards and prizes, including: Frieze Artist Award (2022); Awards for Artists, Paul Hamlyn Foundation (2021); Support Structures for Support Structures, Serpentine Gallery (2021); SPACE Artist Awards (2021); Thinking Time, Artangel (2020); Jerwood Arts Bursary (2019); Aziz Foundation Academic Scholarship (2018); Khadijah Saye Memorial Fund Scholarship (2017); Annie Blaber Scholarship, Dounie Trust (2017); UCL Union Centenary Social Colours (2008).

Abbas lives and works in West London