Contributing member reception previewing 'Abbas Akhavan: Variations on a Garden', the artist's first major US museum survey.
Abbas Akhavan has a contributing member reception at the Walker Art Center on Wednesday, November 11, from 5:30 to 7:30 PM in the Cargill Lounge. It's a preview of Abbas Akhavan: Variations on a Garden, the artist's first major US museum survey, which opens to the public the next day and runs through April 18, 2027, across four galleries. The exhibition is accompanied by his first comprehensive monograph, also titled Variations on a Garden.
Akhavan was born in Tehran in 1977 and now lives and works in Montreal and Berlin. His work spans more than two decades and centers on quiet encounters with the passage of time, manipulating organic and inorganic matter to raise questions about ecological change, cultural preservation, and the division between public and private space. The garden is his central metaphor—a negotiation between wild and domesticated life.
Two pieces give a sense of what that looks like in practice. Study for a Monument (2013–ongoing) consists of bronze casts of plants once plentiful in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, laid out like casualties of war. cast for a folly (2019/2023) renders a photograph of the looted 2003 Iraq Museum lobby as a theatrical set. The show is curated by Pavel Pyś with Brandon Eng, with lead support from the Teiger Foundation.
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The reception is on November 11 from 5:30 to 7:30 PM at the Cargill Lounge, 725 Vineland Place, and tickets are $50 per person. The full exhibition opens the following day, November 12, and runs through April 18, 2027.
