Shahryar Nashat
L'Almanach 26 : Shahryar Nashat
Shahryar Nashat
Shahryar Nashat explores the relationships between the body, objects, and images in works that include video, sculpture, and photography. He is especially interested in bodily fluids, desire, human fragility, and the way technologies transform our perception of the body and intimacy, bolstering fragmentation and distancing.
For his exhibition at the Consortium Museum, the artist is presenting two recent works, including Bleeding Precious, created in 2024 for his first major solo show at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome. In this piece, he investigates the visual and conceptual links between the meaning of blood in Christian theology and the fragmented representation of the body and its fluids.
Both works also constitute a reflection on desire and disgust, on life cycles and death, as well as the act of artistic creation itself.
In Bleeding Precious, Nashat gives sculptural form to bodily flows. The installation consists of a network of canals in pink acrylic resin and fiberglass through which an opaque liquid circulates. The use of synthetic materials, coupled with organic sounds—swallowing and whimpering—that accompany the work, creates an immersive experience that heightens the feeling of ephemerality and confronts the viewer with the body’s materiality and fragility. The work calls to mind both biological processes (circulation, digestion, evacuation) and a metaphor for artistic creation: a transformation of materials, of formal transfers.
The second work, Lover_00.JPEG (2022), displayed on a large LED screen, explores the body as a receptacle of flows, wavering between eroticism and the clinical gaze. Sourcing his images from YouTube, TikTok, or pornographic websites, the artist reworks them in order to “reveal the brutality of a simple intimate gesture: a sex worker exchanging saliva with somebody. Not only the erotic act, but also the fact that saliva physically penetrates the body of the other individual. Therefore, the second part is basically a subjective view of saliva through the digestive tube” (interview with Alessandro Di Pietro, Blood Most Precious, Istituto Svizzero, Rome).
The artist also draws inspiration from Vito Acconci’s 4 Saliva Studies (1971), performances in which saliva and the process of its production are framed as an artistic act in and of itself. These two works are in close dialogue: Lover probes the inside of the body and its invisible exchanges, while Bleeding Precious externalizes its flows in a tangible and spatial form. Nashat enlists an aesthetic that is both sensual and disturbing, in which desire and discomfort coexist, revealing the complexity of our contemporary relationship to intimacy and image.