Streams of Spleen: Shahryar Nashat's multisensory solo exhibition at MASI in Lugano

From March 17 to August 18, 2024, MASI, Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana, in Lugano presents the solo exhibition by Shahryar Nashat curated by Francesca Benini entitled Streams of Spleen. The artist intervened with a site-specific project on the space of MASI’s underground hall, completely distorting its atmosphere. The works on display are placed in relation to the modified architecture and create a multisensory environment. Through videos, sculptures and installations, the artist creates experiences that evoke emotions and moods that are difficult to express rationally. Avoiding definitive conclusions, Nashat explores concepts such as desire, mortality, animal instinct and art itself, areas elusive to full understanding. In MASI’s underground hall, there is a mix of unease and fascination. The floor is covered with vinyl tiles, while the tone of the lights is distorted. In the center of the room, a low-ceilinged structure invites the audience to enter.

The beating heart of the exhibition is the new video Streams of Spleen (2024). The video is looped on a large wall of light screens in the center of the room. In this work, which features wolves, Shahryar Nashat urges us to move away from the human-centric perspective and take on the animal point of view. The human body is at the center of the other works in the exhibition. The new sculptures in the Bone In series, which the artist has been working on since 2019, look like real pieces of meat of unknown origin and recall the processes of the food industry. Also in the fiberglass sculptures Boyfriend_14.JPEG, Boyfriend_15. JPEG, and Boyfriend_16.JPEG, the artist fuses carnality with geometric structures by intervening with imperfections that seem to reveal muscular or skeletal tissue. The association with the body is also found in two inkjet prints, Brother_03.JP EG and Brother_07.JPEG, which depict a ribcage. Nashat is a keen observer of art history and sometimes includes techniques and materials from centuries-old tradition in his work, as in the case of the marble sculptures Hustler_23.JP EG and Hustler_24.JPEG. In the collective imagination, marble indeed evokes works ranging from antiquity to the modern period, and like no other material it has always been used to represent the human body.

The catalog that accompanies the exhibition can also be considered an artistic operation: conceived by Shahryar Nashat in collaboration with graphic designer Sabo Day and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen, it presents itself at first glance as an instruction manual, but it turns out to be a poetic journey reflecting on human existence and what it means to be an artist. The book closes with a critical text by Francesca Benini and Gioia Dal Molin and is co-produced by MASI Lugano, Istituto Svizzero, Rome and Lenz Press.

“The body-the flesh-becomes an object, presented according to traditional forms of display and representing the concrete-material dimension of being, in a digitized age in which both the body and the art object are often mediated by screens,” explains Francesca Benini, curator of the exhibition.

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Streams of Spleen: Shahryar Nashat's multisensory solo exhibition at MASI in Lugano

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