Marking the preview opening of Some seasons: Fereydoun Ave and the Laal Collection, 1959-2019, join us for a conversation led by exhibition co-curators Negar Azimi and Sohrab Mohebbi, with artist, curator, designer and collector Fereydoun Ave, graphic designer Aria Kasaei, and artist Nazgol Ansarinia. 

The conversation will engage with Fereydoun Ave’s singular legacy, both as an artist, collector and through 13 Vanak, the groundbreaking space he founded in Tehran, launching the careers of countless artists over the two decades it was open. 

‘Some seasons: Fereydoun Ave and the Laal Collection, 1959-2019’ was originally conceived by the Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International and is curated by Negar Azimi and Sohrab Mohebbi with Talia Heiman.

Fereydoun Ave received his BA in Applied Arts for Theatre from Arizona State University (1964), studied Film at New York University (1969), and attended the University of Seven Seas (aka Semester at Sea, 1964). Over the past five decades, he has taken on many different roles as an artist, designer, art director, collector, curator, gallerist, and art patron. Fereydoun Ave’s joint project with artists and institutions are an integral part of his practice, finding expression in his role as a curator, gallerist, and collector. Works of Fereydoun Ave have been featured in numerous solo exhibitions along with hundreds of group shows in galleries and museums around the world. They have been acquired by prestigious art institutions such as the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Cy Twombly Foundation in New York, and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Aria Kasaei co-founded Studiokargah in 2001 as a graphic design studio in the heart of Tehran.  In 2014, he started Studiokargah Archival Projects, an attempt to collect, classify and curate the documents of Iran’s pre-revolution visual arts and culture in order to prevent them from being erased and forgotten. These projects included exhibitions, discussion panels, and a publication for each project. He has collaborated with the Musee d’ Art Moderne, Paris (MAM), Musee Des Arts Decoratifs Paris (MAD), Fondazione MAXXI Rome, Tate London, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts (TMoCA), Pejman Foundation and Nabshi Center in Tehran.

Nazgol Ansarinia’s work examines the systems and networks that underpin her daily life such as everyday objects, routines, events and experiences, and the relationship they form to a larger social context. Born and raised in Tehran, Ansarinia’s practice reflects upon tensions between private worlds and the wider socioeconomic realm, and how local iterations of a culture might act as a site for the hopes and fears of those living in a (faltering) globalised world. Nazgol Ansarinia graduated from the London College of Communication in 2001 before taking a Master of Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco in 2003, and has exhibited individually and as part of group shows in the Middle East, Europe, Australia, and South Korea.

Negar Azimi is a writer and editor and occasional curator. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing and curatorial project Bidoun. Her essays, criticism, and reportage have appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and elsewhere. With Pati Hertling she organises the epistolary series Deadlines and Divine Distractions. 

Sohrab Mohebbi is Director of SculptureCenter (New York) since 2022. He is also serving as the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International, opening in 2022. Mohebbi has also served as SculptureCenter’s Curator-at-Large (2020-21), and as Curator between 2018 and 2020. Before joining SculptureCenter in 2018, he was associate curator at REDCAT in Los Angeles and curatorial fellow at the Queens Museum. He is an advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and has organized exhibitions and programs for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA; SALT, Istanbul; and the Center for Historical Reenactments, Johannesburg, South Africa. He received an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a BFA in photography from Tehran Art University.