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The artist has often explored the relationship of wealth and power with aesthetics and architecture in his work, highlighting the fact that historic monuments were generally built by victorious kings and warriors as grand statements memorialising their legacies of power. In this show he has used architecture to talk about how genetic heritage is often a record of the legacies of conquest and aggression by one race or country over another. He did extensive research on the distinctive historic architecture of the 33 countries of his ancestry and created handmade ceramic models of the most significant monuments from each one, constructing his own identity through the language of architecture.

“Each monument is a celebrated symbol of the identity of that country but together the 33 structures also trace the evolution of a conventional roof into a dome. I started with the simplest and earliest form, which was an upturned boat used as a roof in Norway, moving on to the domes of ancient stupas in Asia and the elaborate domes of other monuments. I reduced the scale of each monument to a diameter of 10 inches and used different clays and glazes to ensure each one is distinct. These monuments represent power, aggressive action and conquest in the past, so I am questioning my personal history through the movement of power across countries and cultures,” Pouyan says.

For the show, he has arranged his tiny sculptures on a shelf running around a massive steel cuboid structure. The sequence reflects the transformation of the dome from the simplest to more complex forms resulting from the interaction and conflict between cultures. The cube references art history evoking the modernist concept of abstracting and reducing things to their most simplified purest form. By disrupting and contaminating the pure minimalist structure with his diverse sculptures, the artist thus also questions notions of the purity of art, architecture and anthropology.

“The history of modern art is based on this idealism of purifying form and identity, and we also have a history of Nazi era scientific theories about racial purity, including a study where the facial features of human beings were used for racial categorisation. On this modernist cube I have added a layer of pre-modern and diverse architectural history, and a layer of the science of latest genetic profiling, creating a synthesis of the past, present and future. It is like a new temple of identity representing who we are,” Pouyan says.

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