Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art
26 Oct 2022 – 8 Jan 2023
Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Strange Clay explores the possibilities of thinking through making.
The artworks vary in scale, finish and technique, and address topics that range from architecture, to social justice, the body, the domestic and the organic.
While contributing to the broadening dialogue between art and craft, this exhibition provides a closer look at this tactile medium.
This exhibition is a continuation of Pouyan’s work on My place is the placeless – I, Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, 2017, a series exploring Pouyan’s rejection of national and ethnic labelling.
Pouyan took a genetic genealogy test four years ago. The findings showed that 33 contemporary nations from Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, the Caucasus Mountains, Northern Europe, and the British Isles share a common Genetic ancestor. Some of the nations—like Norway, Ireland, and Bhutan—came as a surprise, while others—like Iraq, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—did not. In order to find their most important monuments and “create” his own identity through the language of architecture, Pouyan spent two years intensively researching distinctive historic architecture from these 33 nations.
The exhibition’s centrepiece was a huge cuboid industrial structure, on top of which were positioned the thirty-three ceramic sculptures that were the outcome of his research. According to the DNA test, each sculpture is a representation of a dome from a significant structure in the nation of the artist’s genetic origin. While some domes are simply grandiose and powerful statements, others are connected to religious structures or places of worship.
The artist uses a Foucauldian method to create a unique genealogy of the dome, illustrating how people typically commemorate powerful ancestors, just as genetic ancestry frequently contains evidence of imperial ancestors. Also, the arrangement of the domes suggests a Darwinist typology in which the basic dome form undergoes multiple morphological changes as a result of cultural contact and struggle. The cuboid installation, however, challenges the myth of progress by tying the most complex dome in the series back to its most basic form—an upside-down spacecraft.
The sculptures’ cuboid foundations are reminiscent of modernist architects like Le Corbusier and minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd who were interested in minimising form to its most basic manifestation. In contrast, Pouyan’s sculptures are firmly anchored in the past and purposefully make references to vivid and rich pre-modern architectural heritage. Each piece is unique since it is fashioned from a different kind of clay and glaze. Since no two pieces are same, there is a sense of variety and even chaos. Pouyan “contaminates” the chaste minimalist structure by incorporating these items into it, negating its benefits and calling into question ideas of purity in regard to anthropology, art, and architecture.
Pouyan also exhibits a series of hand painted altered images that incorporate imagery from Byzantine, Scandinavian, Mesopotamian, and Iranian sources with the ceramic series. They are self-portraits of his previous and current selves since the figures (such as those seen in coins, manuscripts, miniatures, and sculptures) have been altered to delicately incorporate his own features. These altered photos represent the histories of political aggression in a way that is a reverse violation of these historical objects. By doing what he characterises as a “archaeology of the self,” Pouyan attacks such arbitrary categories of identity. The exhibition by Pouyan is a crucial one for these uncertain times, when radical nationalism is on the rise, borders are being investigated, and migration is one of our greatest current concerns.