PTSD, Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, 2014
Pouyan’s first foray into ceramics, this body of work draws inspiration from the use of ceramics as a commonly prescribed therapeutic tool for those struggling to overcome the stress, anxiety, and depression associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The core of the exhibition was composed of four discrete sets of typologically related ceramic objects, grouped together and presented on individual tables—playing on the double meaning of table as a structure and surface for both organization and display. The tables suggest a variety of distinct modes of display employed throughout history up to the current moment, ranging from painted still-lives and scaled down architectural models to displays of recently uncovered ancient artifacts or seized caches of arms or other contraband.
Part of an ongoing investigation into the forms and structures of power and hegemony, Pouyan’s past work repeated the phallus—as tower, hoof and missile—as a symbol of the enduring patriarchal structure of society across the Middle East. Through repetition and variation of this set of simple but suggestive symbolic forms Pouyan investigates scale and proportion in relation to the ideologies, architectures, and structures of possession, domination, and destruction both ancient and modern. One table presents a skyline of differently styled historical domes conceived purely as expressions of power, from the iconic Pantheon in Rome to the gigantic edifice anchoring Welthauptstadt Germania, the planned but never realized renewal of Berlin into capital of Nazi Germany. Another presents a row of six perfectly hemispherical domes, identical but ranging in size from millimeters to meters, whose shifting scale demonstrates the growing capacity of nuclear destruction through the twentieth century.
Presented alongside the artillery shells, bombs and domes are other sculptures, more ambiguously gendered and less functionally clear—engines, batteries, jars, pipes and other “failed objects”—that introduce suggestions of containment and protection, nurturing and vulnerability, and fertility and generation. While Pouyan’s playfully chronicles human hubris and the destruction it enables with the hope and possibility of creation and regeneration.