Abbas Akhavan – cast for a folly, MAY 9–JULY 27, 2019
Abbas Akhavan cast for a folly May 9–July 27, 2019
CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, USA
All we have are cavities.
Or, all we are, are cavities. We know that the human body is comprised of multiple cavities that carry our insides, completing our bodies through their absence, never visible from the exterior. Cavities are markers of decay, gapes in the smooth enamel of our teeth, that allude to underlying breakdown. Some of us will lose ’em all (a mouthful of cavities, as the song goes). The list of tangible cavities is long—the orifice of a tree, the gap between our walls, underground caverns. Then there are the less perceptible ones, like nebulas, or the electromagnetic energy between the surface of the Earth and the inner edge of the upper atmosphere, 55 kilometers up, or what lies beneath our disintegrating glaciers. A cavity itself is a falsehood, a hole inside a whole.
Cavity living involves a degree of slipperiness, in which the parameters of time feel hazy. It is unclear whether we are in now or then, in the way that we are uncertain if these vitrines possess anything inside of their drawers (or if they are drawers at all). Walls and pillars are hollowed out, an escape hatch is blocked, a door has the contour of a cabinet but is cut like a frame. Artifice is the vernacular, as told by this painting that is in fact a green portal, a futuristic form that indicates we may be elsewhere rather than here. The architecture, in its exposure and impairment, renders vulnerability and trauma as much as absence and disappearance. We are in a beautiful and bruised sentiment.
