Abbas Akhavan: Variations at the Walker Art Center will be the first US museum survey of the artist’s work. Exploring Akhavan’s (b.1977, Tehran; based in Berlin and Montréal) practice in sculpture and installation, the exhibition foregrounds his engagement with ecological change, the destruction of cultural heritage, and how silenced social narratives are transmitted across time and place. 

Abbas Akhavan, cast for a folly, 2019/2023. Museum vitrines, benches, false doorway, digitally-printed sharkstooth scrim fabric wall, green screen, mirrors, sconces, oscillating fan, chairs, plastic bucket, air conditioner, open-cell foam cushions, moving blanket, clay bricks, pump, water lilies, dolly, straw, sand, plywood, and mortar. Installation view in curtain call at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, June 23–November 26, 2023. Courtesy Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Photo: David Stjernholm

Curator Pavel Pyś aims to create dialogue across different bodies of work from the past two decades, revealing shared concerns. Three overlapping nuclei will shape the exhibition: War, Conflict, and Violence; Ecological Change; and Public and Private Spaces. The installation cast for a folly (2019/2023) replicates a photograph of the lobby of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which was looted during the 2003 invasion. In Study for a Monument (2013–ongoing), oversize bronze casts of plants once common to the Tigris-Euphrates river system are placed on funerary sheets, alluding to the erosion of a once fertile habitat. Refrigerators filled with bouquets in buckets conjure the economies and symbolic meanings associated with the act of giving flowers (untitled, 2017–ongoing). Throughout the exhibition, spikes of deterrent architecture protrude into space, parts of fountains freeze and thaw, and chroma key green screens recur. Akhavan’s material interventions question binaries and remind us how deeply the built environment informs behavior and well-being.

The artist’s most comprehensive catalogue to date—featuring essays by Pyś, David Joselit, and Oxana Timofeeva, as well as an interview between the artist and Curatorial Assistant Brandon Eng—will accompany the exhibition.

Abbas Akhavan, Study for a Monument, 2013–ongoing. Cast-bronze and cotton sheets. Installation view in variations on a garden at Mercer Union, Toronto, September 12–October 31, 2015. Courtesy Mercer Union. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Abbas Akhavan, untitled, 2017–ongoing. Refrigerators, flowers, and plastic buckets. Installation view in cast for a folly at Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), Vancouver, June 22–August 22, 2022. Courtesy CAG. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography

Pavel S. Pyś is Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy at the Walker Art Center. Pyś is the cocurator (with Jennie Goldstein and Tom Finkelpearl) of Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night (2025), the artist’s first major museum survey co-organized by the Walker and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). Pyś curated the group exhibitions Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s (2023) and The Body Electric (2019), as well as solo projects by Daniel Buren, Paul Chan, Pan Daijing, Michaela Eichwald, Carolyn Lazard, Sarah Michelson, Ralph Lemon and Kevin Beasley, and Elizabeth Price. Previously, Pyś was the Exhibitions and Displays Curator at the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds, UK). He received an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College (2010) and an MSc in Culture & Society from the London School of Economics (2009). In 2025, he was awarded a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship.

Regina Bain, Louis Armstrong House Museum (LAHM)