The Brooklyn Rail

Imagine a reality where the future is historical and the past contemporary, where time stands still and simultaneously moves on. Ali Banisadr conjures such wondrous worlds in his paintings. By bringing the ancient into conversation with phenomena of the present and the future, he explores what stands the test of time. And the circumstances of the current exhibition itself similarly weave together distinct layers of time and space, as the Tehran-born and Brooklyn-based painter celebrates his first solo show with Victoria Miro in the British capital during this year’s Frieze Art Fair.

To reach Banisadr’s exhibition on the top floor of Miro’s Victorian furniture factory on Wharf Road, one must first pass a Paula Rego show of large-scale paintings from the 1980s on the ground floor and venture outside, past a matcha-colored lake in the garden, before entering the second gallery through the back door. Then, there are some fifty steps to conquer via a narrow staircase before one finally reaches Banisadr’s exhibition. This display on the top floor is intentional, and a first clue to the significance of the journey or quest a visitor must undertake to see the show might derive from the artist’s Instagram moniker, @simorgh3. Simorgh (which is Farsi for thirty birds) refers to a god-like avian creature and the eponymous object of desire in the Sufi epic, Attar of Nishapur’s The Conference of the Birds.¹ Attar’s poem follows the quest of all the birds of the world to find the legendary Simorgh. While passing the seven valleys of quest—love, knowledge, detachment, unity, wonderment, poverty and annihilation (the last two count as one)—to find Simorgh’s abode, the number of participating birds dwindles one by one to a final thirty. Arriving at the abode, they learn that together, with all their varied traits and characteristics, they themselves make up the legendary Simorgh.

Such scattered and fragmented divine energy² also emanates from Banisadr’s paintings, as swarms of anthropomorphic forms often populate his action-rich and reference-riddled compositions. Both abstract and figurative in nature, they resemble an explosion that hurls and whirls bodies, fragments, and ruins with vitriolic force. Yet the potential over-saturation of Banisadr’s paintings is often only temporary and dissipates slowly into a more serene state. We see this in The Changing Past, where twelve paintings, half of which are large scale, line the expansive warehouse-style walls at eye-level. Rather than the artist’s previously-favored bird’s eye view, their atmospheric perspective allows us to step into the theatrical worlds unraveling in front of our eyes at our own pace.

Take, for example, the Rebis figure, which Banisadr painted in five different portrait-style incarnations that open the show at Victoria Miro. First mentioned in Paracelsus’s treatise Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, the Rebis figure symbolizes the final stage of alchemy, when water and fire become one. It has often been depicted as a hermaphrodite carrying both female and male energies or characteristics. Likewise, Banisadr shrouds the face or identity of his protagonist in secrecy, chronicling the fabled figure’s alchemical metamorphosis from the human to the divine. He begins with a black-winged creature with a Janus head (Rebis [2023]) that slowly regains its power when a serpent snakes around its left leg (Rebis 1 [2023]). Its power continues to wax in the third incarnation, which resembles an embattled knight wielding a sword in its right hand (Rebis 2 [2023]). Meanwhile, in Rebis 3 (2023), the figure stands amidst a paradisiacal meadow lifting its cloak, and its final incarnation (Rebis 4, 2023) is revealed in a heavenly gown and star-like headdress amidst the clouds.

Although Banisadr discovered the Rebis figure while working on his large-scale painting Queen of the Night (2022), a Mesopotamian counterpart of the Rebis, the artist appears not as concerned with illustrating epics as with making sense of the world we inhabit at present. For in his Queen of the Night composition, divine or ghoulish forces preside over an almost orderly parade on horseback—a scene that could’ve easily foreshadowed November 11th’s procession through Central London when up to one million people marched for ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the more unruly composition of Cornerstone (2023), tinged with earthen shades of brown and gray that evoke the weathered walls of monuments, whirling fragments and ruins appear to spiral down, sinking into the open ground. Interwoven in this work’s tapestry of references are both a likeness of the Trojan Horse³ (which anticipated the fall of the Hellenic Troy) and the toppling of enslaver Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in June 2020 during the onset of Black Lives Matter protests in the UK.⁴

By summoning both historic and contemporary spirits, Banisadr counteracts overly specific interpretations and leaves room for the bigger picture. Like the birds from the Simorgh fable, it is the totality of the twelve paintings on view here, with their interwoven networks of references, symbols, and stories, that form The Changing Past—or in other words, the present. As translator Dick Davis argued in his notes for the 1984 translation of The Conference of the Birds, the clue does not lie in the visualization of one metaphor, as is common in the English language, but in the combination of all stylistic devices, as is the norm in Persian literature.⁵ Hence, it is Banisadr’s evocative titles—such as the existentialist Is time an arrow or a wheel? (2023) or the poetic These fragments I have shored against my ruins (2023) borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—and references, both ancient and futuristic, that piece together his scattered landscapes and help us make sense of the changing and tumultuous times we live in.

1. Farid Attar, The Conference of the Birds. London: Penguin, 1984.
2. In conversation with writer Ottessa Moshfegh, Banisadr referred to this epic as his definition of spirituality or spiritual energy. See: Aaron Hicklin: “Disgust has been an enormous theme in my life”, Ottessa Moshfegh in conversation with Ali Banisadr, Grand Journal (May 24, 2023), https://grandjournal.net/disgust-has-been-an-enormous-theme-in-my-life/
3. Ali Banisadr in conversation with John Yau, The Changing Past, London: Victoria Miro, 2023, p. 85.
4. Martin Farrer: “Who was Edward Colston and why was his Bristol statue toppled?”, The Guardian (June 8, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/08/who-was-edward-colston-and-why-was-his-bristol-statue-toppled-slave-trader-black-lives-matter-protests
5. Dick Davis: “Introduction,” in: Farid Attar, The Conference of the Birds. London: Penguin 1984, not paginated.