Shahpour Pouyan at Lawrie Shabibi

Tsar Trauma by Shahpour Pouyan. Image courtesy Lawrie Shabibi

Known for his sculptures of missile forms and objects of war, Shahpour Pouyan is interested in expressions of power.

The Iranian-American artist has had numerous solo shows that explore this but the current exhibition in Lawrie Shabibi Gallery is a little different. Under the guidance of curator Murtaza Vali, he has pushed himself out of his comfort zone and produced an entire show of ceramics objects

“I wanted to push him away from his reliance on the missile or phallus form,” says Vali.

Using ceramic because working with that material is commonly prescribed as a therapeutic tool for those struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the result was a set of four objects that each explore a different area of his investigation.

There is Still Life, a collection of artillery shells based on a photograph he found while he was doing research into WW1. “This piece is about the ratios between form and colour as much as it is about what the objects are,” says Vali. “If you repeat the form enough times it doesn’t have the same power.”

Then there are the ceramic domes in the centre of the gallery based on real domes from different historical periods. They range from the iconic Pantheon in Rome to the gigantic edifice anchoring Welthauptstadt Germania, the planned but never realized renewal of Berlin into capital of Nazi Germany.

“The dome is an ideological expression of power,” says Vali. “It’s shape is also infinite.”

On another table, arranged like items from an archeological dig are items the artist has called the Failed Object series.

The items are organic forms that are neither something nor nothing. “One could argue that any and every object is ambiguous before function is assigned to it,” explains Vali. Pouyan therefore, is exploring the kind of meaning we attach to these items.

Along the back wall is Tzar Trauma, ever declining sculptures of nuclear reactors whose sizes relate directly to the destruction of nuclear explosions.

His work seems to be steeped in violence but there is, according to the gallery, some hope.

“While Pouyan’s playfully perverse object genealogies of terror and aggression seek to establish the traumatic scale of human ambition and the ratio of evil through history, they temper this chronicle of human hubris and the destruction it enables with the hope and possibility of creation and regeneration.”

* Shahpour Pouyan: PSTD runs at Lawrie Shabibi gallery until April 22