TEHRAN- The group exhibition “The Earth has Shifted” by the Iranian-Londoner gallery Ab-Anbar was launched at the exhibition space L’Atlas in Paris on Thursday.

The exhibit gathers nine artists under the curation of Sarina Basta, from the cooperative Radicants including Marlon de Azambuja, Fadia Haddad, Mohammad Ghazali, Hussein Nassereddine, Neda Razavipour, Hessam Samavatian, Azzedine Saleck, Baktash Sarang, and Nil Yalter, Galleryinfo reported.

“At the turn of the millennium, Earth’s spin started going off-kilter, and nobody could quite say why. It was with some surprise that geophysicists have measured a change in our planet’s rotational axis, data which started to be made public in the past year. The explanation was that the large amounts of water pumped out of the earth for household and agricultural use have shifted how the earth’s mass is distributed. And yet, even though everything is now slightly off-kilter, on the surface things remain the same,” the statement about the exhibition said.

“In 1960, less than two decades after the nuclear disaster of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, writer Marguerite Duras was commissioned by filmmaker Alain Resnais to write a script about this tragedy. Duras’ task, puts forth a quandary: how does one attempt to convey that which is incommensurable, which is inadmissible, which is unfathomable? Through the dialogue of the characters, set in Hiroshima, one of the main protagonists admits that the sequence of events was beyond what could be conveyed by a flat denial of any possible memory or description of the aftermath of the event. Within the banality of a romantic affair, a decade after the bomb, everyday life unfolds on the Peace Square in Hiroshima, and yet nothing will ever be the same,” the statement continued.

“The artists in ‘The Earth has Shifted,’ have been invited to think about an Earth off-kilter, off-axis, where experiences or ruptures have left a trace or shift in our environment, difficult to convey or describe, yet present in our psyches”.

In Persian, “Ab” means water and “Anbar” means reservoir. This is how the contemporary art gallery Ab-Anbar, opened in Tehran in 2014, defines itself: as the architectural expression of a physical space that hosts a malleable and life-essential content. Involved in the crossed stories of art and history, it represents worldwide artists, whose work overcomes esthetical, political, social, and psychological borders.

Since 2020, Ab-Anbar has been settled in London, with a new space opened in September 2023 in the historical neighborhood of Fitzrovia. Its ambition is to support dialogue between artists, collectors, museums, and curators, toward inclusion and understanding of marginalized realities.

Radicants is a curatorial cooperative, created in 2022 by Nicolas Bourriaud. Global in vision and scope, Radicants is designed as an organic and nomadic cooperative model, in phase with the evolution of the art world. The platform conceives innovative exhibitions, imagined by independent curators at the international level.

Radicants specializes in exhibition production, cultural engineering, publications, and the sale of exhibitions and artworks and collaborates with the different actors in the art sector. Its mission is to offer cutting-edge exhibitions and to showcase emerging artists as well as those who have been overlooked in the history of art.

Supported by the Emerige Group, L’Atlas is an exhibition space in the heart of the new neighborhood La Félicité, which proposes to invite foreign galleries, foundations, or institutions to present one or more artists from the international contemporary scene. 

L’Atlas allows its partners to set up a branch in the heart of the Parisian capital for two months, in line with the calendar of major artistic events (fairs, biennials, etc.). L’Atlas is an open door to the world, a showcase for the most dynamic private or public actors, and a meeting place for artists, professionals, and the general public.

L’Atlas is part of the Emerige Group’s ambitious program of support for the contemporary art scene, with a program focused mainly on international artists.

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