Abbas Akhavan – One Hundred Years, SEPTEMBER 5–DECEMBER 7, 2025
Abbas Akhavan One Hundred Years September 5–December 7, 2025
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Taking up notions of suspended time, Abbas Akhavan’s exhibition One Hundred Years contends with temporal halting and how time is represented in narrativized spaces. Weighing the narrative drive of storytelling against the emptying out of content or the freezing of narrative, Akhavan’s work simultaneously activates a stage and presses pause.
Presenting largely new works, the Belkin exhibition includes site-specific and ephemeral installations, video and sculpture that blur the meanings and distinctions between stage, set, gameboard, studio and gallery. These works continue Akhavan’s interest in institutional and domestic spaces that contend with the coexistence of hospitality and hostility. Between the institutional and domestic are spaces of captivity, fantasy spaces, gaming spaces and spaces that condition behaviour and operate as civilizing architectures.
One Hundred Years offers shifting relations and narratives between objects, situations and audiences to occupy a fertile uncertainty. Within this constellation, actions and forms blur the distinctions between sleeping, halting, freezing and glitching, and function outside of linearity.
Abbas Akhavan: One Hundred Years is curated by Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members. Abbas Akhavan’s 2025 residency at UBC is jointly supported by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and Green College, where he was made a Cecil H. and Ida Green Visiting Professor to UBC.
