DUBAI.- Moved earth, dotted with machines, poles, lines, and occasional people perform an industrial ballet of orchestrated searching. Present is a fleeting implied chronology in the paintings, as concern lands on the future and past of the site in progress. Carbon 12 presents Site/Sight new paintings by Talar Aghbashian for her first solo exhibition at Carbon 12 and in the UAE. For the first time in Aghbashian’s paintings people populate the precarious balance of the present, caught between deconstruction and reconstruction. With scientific, architectural, and progressive intent read plainly on their mimed gestures the workers plan what will be.

Aghbashian perpetuates the simulation of our present environment. Not only with the choice of her source imagery (stills and web based images) but also her painting technique preserves a sense of “authenticity” for found image. Working with the photographs original composition, she simplifies the characters into obtuse shapes, allowing us to focus on the grandiose gestures of the workers.

She appropriates and recreates what, via the web and media is already a manufactured situation. The constant facelift of our environment, forever assembled by the laborers at play reveal the cyclical nature of our societal progression. We search, destroy, repair to then search anew for something to destroy and make again in our current image. There is no end result or prognosis for the job in progress. What the workers and conductors search for is just outside of reach, as the action of finding/fixing covers up what is sought after.

Talar Aghbashian b. 1981, Beirut, Lebanon. Lives and works in London, UK

Talar Aghbashian holds a BA in Painting and Drawing from Lebanese University of Fine Arts and an MFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She has been a part of the group exhibition “Small Detonations” at Carbon 12 in 2014 and had a solo exhibition in “The Running Horse”, Beirut.