Pooya Abbasian

8. MÖREL x MEP Studio 

Maltournée

In a practice that encompasses photography, video, drawing and installation, Pooya Abbasian explores the complex and often paradoxical relationship between images and our notions of reality and truth. Although it is not explicitly his main theme, his work is informed by his childhood in Iran and his migration to Europe at the age of 26.

The centrepiece of the exhibition at the MEP is the short film Maltournée. The film depicts a missed opportunity to engage with a community of refugees and asylum-seekers living along the Saint-Denis canal, near the Stade de France, who were abruptly evacuated by the police and disappeared. Abbasian poetically documents their traces, evoking the emotions, situations, and objects that once filled this no-man’s-land; through the use of tracking shots, dialogue, and voice-over, he captures the intense presence of their absence. The film was produced with the support of the Wim Wenders Foundation as part of a project in which six Iranian filmmakers, mentored by Wenders, explored the theme “A Sense of Place” in Iran or in exile.

The exhibition at also includes parts of broken toilets or sinks that the artist found in the suburbs. He transforms these porcelain objects using a process inspired by photographic emulsions, making their surface photosensitive and then projecting images onto them via video using photographs taken near the site where the objects were found. This unpredictable process results in delicate, precarious images that transform the fragments into fossils, fragile remnants of an abandoned place haunted by its past, existing somewhere between memory and fantasy.

About the Artist
Pooya Abbasian, born in 1985, is an Iranian artist based in Paris since 2011. A long-time collaborator of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, he has screened his films in numerous art spaces and film festivals, including the Pejman Foundation, the CPH-DOX Dokumentary Filmfestival Copenhagen, the Pictoplasma Festival Berlin, and the BelDocs Festival in Belgrade.

Edition of 200
17cmx24cm
44 pages

Published in conjunction with the exhibition:
Maltournée
Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris 12.04.2024 - 26.05.2024