variations on a garden is a solo exhibition in DRAF Studio by Iranian-Canadian artist Abbas Akhavan (b. Tehran, Iran).
The sculptural installation Study for a Monument (2013–2015) presents a series of bronze plants laid out on white cotton bed sheets. These are the forms of Iris barnumea and Campanula acutiloba, among many others, native species from the area in and around the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in present day Iraq. This area is where the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon are presumed to have been built; in the same area in the 1990s the salt marshes were destroyed by Saddam Hussein in his campaign against the Marsh Arabs, and subsequently ravaged by the Iraq wars. Working with the ‘Flora of Iraq’ archive at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London and living plants from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, Akhavan has enlarged the plant species to human scale. They have been sculpted into plasticine, cast into wax, encased within plaster, melted, cast into bronze and then charred. They are presented as a forensic experiment or funerary monument on the gallery floor.
Also on display are the video installation Ghost (2013), excerpted YouTube footage of American soldiers returning home to surprise their families which repeatedly fades to white, and the photograph and after and after (2003/8). The domestic sphere has been an ongoing area of research for Akhavan, and recent works have looked at the garden, the backyard and other domesticated landscapes. The garden often operates as a symbolic territory in the division between the commons and the proprietorial, between one nation and another.
