Abbas Akhavan

Study for a Monument 2021 is a sculptural installation in which cast bronze elements are arranged on cotton sheets laid on the gallery floor. The individual sculptures are plants that have been enlarged to human scale and then cast in bronze, a material that interests Akhavan for its connection to both the fabrication of ancient Mesopotamian weaponry and the modern erection of monuments. Akhavan’s use of bronze foregrounds the changing and what he calls ‘duplicitous’ nature of the material throughout history (conversation with Nabila Abdel Nabi, July 2021). To create the work the artist researched the indigenous plant life in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates riverbeds – roughly equivalent to modern-day Iraq – that is now endangered due to the damage wrought on the landscape by various conflicts including the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–8, the first Gulf War in 1991 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Akhavan often titles his works as ‘studies’ or ‘variations’ to foreground their speculative and open-ended qualities. Study for a Monument is an ongoing body of work, where each version is essentially unique, comprising seven different plant types based on the artists’s research at Kew Gardens, London, and the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. The sculptures are also unique in that every cast is first sculpted in plasticine, cast into wax and then plaster, before finally being cast in bronze at a foundry in Istanbul, a significant place for Akhavan who has described it as a ‘personal place of refuge during the Iran-Iraq war’ (conversation with Nabila Abdel Nabi, July 2021). The sculptures archive examples of plant species that have survived for thousands of years, such as those found around the southern marshlands of Iraq.

By placing the bronze plants on the floor upon simple cotton bedsheets, Akhavan upends and destabilises the traditional orientation of monuments, which are historically oriented vertically and situated on platforms or plinths. The display format is also evocative of makeshift funeral displays and nineteenth-century taxonomy, as well as the display of smuggled artefacts or weapons that have been seized by the authorities (Abbas Akhavan on Plants, Bronze, and Studies 2017). The artist has referred to the work as an ‘anti-monument’ (conversation with Mark Godfrey, Nabila Abdel Nabi and Carly Whitefield, 20 November 2020). Here, plant life becomes a substitute for the conventionally human-centric nature of memorialising and monument-making. Instead of human figures Akhavan has chosen to memorialise plants, highlighting the impact of human activity on the environment.

Akhavan initially produced the work through his interest in the invasion of Iraq and the role of neo-colonial presence in the ecological destruction of the region. Given the upsurge in discourse since 2020 around public monuments, around who or what gets monumentalised over the course of history, Akhavan’s work expands the traditionally human-centric parameters of this convention to ones that are more ecologically driven.

Nabila Abdel Nabi
September 2021

Further reading
Georgina Jackson, ‘The Body in Ruins: Abbas Akhavan’s “Study for a Monument”’, Afterall, 21 September 2016,
https://www.afterall.org/article/the-body-in-ruins-abbas-akhavan-s-study-for-a-monument, accessed 29 September 2021.
Abbas Akhavan on Plants, Bronze, and Studies, video interview and transcript, 10 March 2017, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, https://www.guggenheim.org/video/abbas-akhavan-on-plants-bronze-and-studies, accessed 29 September 2021.
Abbas Akhavan, Milan 2018.