Sasan Abri

In the following paragraphs, I want to consider why encountering Sasan Abri’s work at this particular moment has become more important to me than ever—and perhaps to others who find themselves in a similar condition. For us as Iranians, the experience of living through years of instability and uncertainty has, above all, confronted us with an ever-shifting reality. Reality is no longer something fixed or dependable; it shifts, moves, and changes form. At times, this instability is so pervasive that it reaches even into memory: we remember the past as altered and distorted, as though each return to it produces a different image. What once appeared to be a certain experience changes with distance and with each act of remembering, until we can no longer say with confidence which of the images we retain corresponds more closely to the reality we are experiencing today. This process of erosion is part of what Sasan Abri brings into view through his work.

Abri’s layered works embody this same uncertainty. His images occupy the threshold between clarity and disappearance, between being and non-being. Standing before one of them, we might ask: in the next moment, will this image have fully taken shape, or will it suddenly dissolve? Instability is not confined to the formal dimension of his work; it also emerges in the selection and treatment of the figures. Is the figure sad? Calm? Worried? We cannot arrive at a definitive answer to any of these questions. The faces inhabit the same shifting state described above—a state in which what we see changes again before it can settle into a fixed meaning.

Perhaps the importance of encountering Sasan Abri’s work at this particular moment begins precisely here, for me. Our instinct for survival compels us, in order to carry on, to push uncertainty as far as possible out of our field of awareness—to live as though the world were still predictable and reality still dependable, even when our lived experience tells us otherwise. Yet, on an existential level, we remain entangled with this instability, continually struggling to understand how to live with something we cannot master. Abri’s work, in this sense, conceals nothing from us. It neither denies uncertainty nor attempts to overcome it. Standing before his work, we encounter an image that does not ask us to make it certain, but instead allows us to remain within its incompleteness and instability, and to see. Perhaps the value of this encounter lies precisely here: without eliminating or resolving uncertainty, the work makes possible a meaningful experience of seeing—one in which not knowing does not necessarily amount to an inability to understand, but can instead become the beginning of another way of understanding instability.