Aziz Anzabi

Biography

AZIZ ANZABI: From politics to poetics. Between tradition and modernity: tapping into memorial exploration to nourish collective consciousness. By placing interiority and personal experience at the service of political awareness, Aziz Anzabi relentlessly questions the means we have to rethink the world in order to relieve sentiments of suffering. Experiencing Iran / Iraq War at an early age, Aziz Anzabi's encounters with iconic figures of Iranian contemporary art such as Bahman Moasses or modern poet Sohrab Sepehri radically impacted his vision. Embodying concepts of exile and oppression, Aziz Anzabi explores novel paths into the idea of free speech, shaping psychic surrealisms to awaken consciences to the violence of our over-standardized world. “I want to mix tradition into contemporary art because I think that Qajar art is the only style that is solely Iranian, with its own unique framework and techniques”. Navigating abstraction and figuration his works evokes a symbolic grammar, both biographical and collective. Anzabi's fantasized landscapes - his moving humans, his uncertain and distorted forms - are so personal that they become universal. They are in no way free from technology, quite the contrary: they would not exist without it. By borrowing from the ancestral Qajar tradition, Aziz Anzabi becomes both craftsman and alchemist. This clever mix of technical requirements linked to an approach of memory nourished by loss, gives life to powerful works : unconscious testimonies, timeless sequences questioning our immediate future. Aziz Anzabi is a fully committed lucid embodiment of a new form of violent poetic activism.