Resonance and Remnants

15 October 2023–21 January 2024

Reclaimed bricks, domestic objects connected to childhood memories, dandelion seeds, sound and scent.

Castlefield Gallery, Manchester

Photography: Jules Lister

  Autopsy of a Home

CENTRE FOR CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART, MANCHESTER / 2020-21

The gallery’s windows and floor were transformed into a domestic interior where belonging and estrangement coexist. During the exhibition, the lighting changed whenever a relative or friend contacted the artist, allowing distant relationships to alter the physical atmosphere of the room.

Dammam

2018-Ongoing

Performance / installation: oil drums, oil-like substance, Persian rug and cymbals. Duration and dimensions variable.

Taking its title from Dammam, a southern Iranian percussion ritual performed during religious mourning ceremonies, the work brings oil, percussion and a Persian carpet into a live action. Performers gradually transfer a dark, oil-like substance across the carpet, obscuring its ornament. The work connects ritual and grief with the extractive history of Iran’s oil-rich south, where Asadi was born, asking how global economies enter cultural and domestic life.

Photo credit: Hamish Irvine,/strong together/ commissioned/Leeds Art University

Falling

Holden Gallery, 2018, Shaved Persian carpet and timber, 340 x 240 x 150 cm

A shaved Persian carpet is held upright by exposed timber supports. Removed from the floor and deprived of its familiar softness, the carpet becomes both architecture and a destabilised domestic surface. The work sets cultural and material associations of ornament, homeand comfort against the provisionallanguage of construction and collapse.

Scuffle Tussle, Struggle

2022 / 7 min 15 sec

Made for Peer to Peer UK/HK with Karen Yu, the video performance treats language as amaterial resistance. Projected English, Persian and Cantonese scripts move across the artist’s body as he wrestles with a malleable form. Translation appears not as a transparent exchange but as a physical process of pressure, loss and reformulation. The work considers the unstable space between a mother tongue and a shared working language.

Photo credit: Jules Lister