The centerpiece of the exhibition is an asymmetrical heptagonal platform that serves as topography for a suite of safinas—newly produced artist books, and never before seen reclaimed materials.

The Third Line is pleased to present Safina, the final chapter of Ala Ebtekar’s solo exhibitions trilogy. This project continues Ala’s commitment to folding space and time onto itself through painting, drawing, and premieres a new installation that shifts harmonies of landscape and horizon.

image Ala Ebtekar, Azimuth, 2017, Cyanotype on canvas exposed to sunlight, 155 x 305 cm / Courtesy of The Third Line an the artist

v

image Ala Ebtekar, Azimuth 2, 2017, Cyanotype on canvas exposed to sunlight, 208 x 147 cm / Courtesy of The Third Line an the artist

In the titular work Safina, the book is examined not only as an art object, but as a vehicle to complicate notions of inertia and travel between space and time. Safina is an oblong shaped manuscript, containing a compendium of potent knowledge fields: history, philosophy, astronomy, and most often, poetry. Safina’s etymology and current linguistic use leans towards several variants of a vessel designed for transportation: a ship, aircraft and even spacecraft. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an asymmetrical heptagonal platform that serves as topography for a suite of safinas—newly produced artist books, and never before seen reclaimed materials. Arranged in a manner to form new taxonomies and constellations of meaning, this Safina revisits the existing model, now displaying a new terrain. As a central contour, with peaks and valleys, Safina gently displays Ala’s long-standing interest in the depiction of space and time. The structure easily could be both fifteenth and twenty-fifth century, as a spaceship simultaneously landed and moving. Culminating altogether past and future, speculative and impending, Safina presents new portals to understanding the potentials of these vessels, as they were physically kept close to the heart, and here an object that travels in and between the most potent of landscapes.

image Ala Ebtekar, Untitled (MS1703), 2017, Cut manuscript page, 31 x 23 cm / Courtesy of The Third Line an the artist

image Ala Ebtekar, Untitled (MS1710), 2017, Cut manuscript page, 23 x 31 cm/ Courtesy of The Third Line an the artist

Ala Ebtekar

Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978) is an artist who works between his native San Francisco Bay Area and Tehran, Iran. Born in Berkeley, California to Iranian activist/artist/architect parents, from an early age, he developed an affinity towards various notions of in-between-ness, which has led him to explore the many spaces amongst the two cultures, both shared and separated, momentary and boundless. Such experiences have evolved into a dynamic practice that disquiets dominant notions of identity and complicates cultural difference. For the past twenty years, he has situated his art practice as a multitude of spaces between, and even above. Ala’s recent investigations have created liminal experiences to longer notions of scientific duration beyond human timelines, cosmic travel and the phenomenology of light. These projects bring forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe gazing back through endless collapses of time and physical reworking of centuries old processes of image making. Ala’s practice extends how our contemporary moments both live together as minuscule and paramount amidst an infinite score of skies and stars.

Ala holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been widely exhibited internationally. His solo shows include Nowheresville, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2015); Elsewhen, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2012); 1388, The Third Line, Dubai UAE (2009); and Emergence, Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California, USA (2006). His work was featured in such group exhibitions as the 2014 Xinjiang Biennale; Migrating Identities, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2013); The Beginning of Thinking is Geometric, Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, UAE (2013); The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989, ZKM – Museum for Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, a touring exhibition originating at the Asia Society, NYC (2008); and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art (2006).


Comments
  • No comments
Add a comment
(to add comment, please )