NEW YORK, NY.- Martos Gallery is presenting All of You, an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Andisheh Avini, and the artist’s first in New York in eight years.
All of You grapples with identity, presence, and absence through sculptural and installation-based works that are simultaneously diasporic, architectural, and personal. By deconstructing how notions of selfhood and memory are deepened and reshaped by geographic and cultural dispersal, what emerges is not a narrative of displacement, but an exploration of an internal sense of identity. One imbued with history and culture, even in the shadow of separation and violence, operating at both an individual and global scale.
The first gallery in the exhibition presents the artist’s head, scaled to his height, and covered in patterned marquetry that echoes throughout the exhibition’s skeletal forms. Looking downward, this work serves as the north star in a constellation of compact glass balls. At varying states of rupture and explosion, they evoke the plastic stripes of a popular childhood toy that has persisted across several generations of Iranian children, shaping core experiences and memories. Also called a Poppy or Pearl Ball, these toys were initially introduced in Iran during a period of economic change dominated by the petroleum industry and can be seen as a connective tissue between Iranian children and their contemporary socio-political reality. Towards the front of this small, windowed room, a sleek box is punctuated by three jewel-like glass organs, protruding at irregular intervals. Heavily autobiographical, this first space, visible from street level, is distinct from the rest of the exhibition while introducing the highly personal narrative present in each work.
Before proceeding into the central exhibition space, viewers are greeted by a steel arch. Operating as a crisp, “line in space,” this entrance is also scaled to the artist’s height. Participation in the exhibition is thus mediated by self-determination: to proceed through this entrance, or to circumvent it. Distance and proximity, especially when confronted with discomfort and avoidance, are central to this exhibition, and the arch functions as a threshold at the edge of this experiential perspective.
Two additional participatory elements are presented alongside the arch. A rack of twelve postcards depicting both artworks in the exhibition, as well as text and images taken by the artist in Iran, invites the viewer to take a piece of work with them, while offering a meditation on “artist” as identity. The museum postcard, after all, is usually the realm of the acclaimed and the dead. Next, a neat stack of checklists, scaled to mimic a 7-inch record, offers a list of titles as viewers are prompted to assign names to each work themselves. Even as the works are presented through the lens of the artist’s heritage, the language of love and atrocity that they speak is universal.
Outlining the body within a measured framework, the arch gives way not to a forest but to a landscape of bodily and architectural forms. Three vertically installed spines anchor the central exhibition space, serving both as structural supports and metaphorical axes. Connecting mind to movement and suggesting resilience, they imply a cultural memory so acute as to be embodied, persisting through geographic distance and pressure. Accompanying, or ripped from, each spine are three luminescent organs—a heart, liver, and stomach—rendered delicately in richly colored glass. In Persian vernacular culture, these organs evoke longing and attachment, representing love that is both intimate and inherited. Here, however, these organs are vulnerable, ripped from the interior architecture that protects them. In this way, their emotive resonance is also punctuated, or punctured, by an explicit exposure. The organs are only protected from shattering by the fine steel threads from which they are suspended.
Floating at varying heights, these deconstructed torsos cast sharp, spectral shadows, drawing attention to a sense of identity that is accompanied by what cannot be fully held. In projecting silhouettes that extend beyond their physical bodies, presence is extended through absence. Embodied continuity, simultaneously ornamented and entombed, speaks to the condition of diaspora as a doubled state of being, embedded in one place while structurally bound to another.
Midway through the gallery, a marquetry spine appears smashed horizontally into the wall, its glass heart exposed. Itself an echo of violence and breakage, this gesture interrupts vertical continuity, registering rupture within what otherwise stands upright. Is this spine buried or emerging from rubble? Nearby, yet spatially removed, a double spine bound in gnarled steel wire shares a single heart. If the former suggests impact, the latter proposes entanglement. Two forms constrained within a shared interior core.
Finally, a large blackened half-dome anchors the far wall. Architectural and abstracted, it invokes inherited form as memory rather than monument, and surface rather than enclosure. Crucially, it acknowledges the exhibition’s situation in the artist’s home city of New York, where this iconography can establish a visual continuity from the grandest mosque in Tehran to smaller, community-based endeavors, themselves a visual diasporic record. The exhibited dome’s burnt appearance acts as its own shadow of charred violence, leaving behind traces of hope and rebuilding. Together, these works sketch a movement from bodily structure to architectural movements and, from internal frameworks to exterior thresholds.
Presented with delicacy and restraint at Martos Gallery, All of You meditates on internal architecture, on suffering and distance, on diaspora and care, and on beauty and an embodied resilience. Here, identity persists, absorbs, and endures. These works, thus, do not resolve separation; instead, they hold it upright, making visible the tension between where one stands and what one carries.
