Where I Work artasiapacific.com^155Where I Work
In a Tehran studio, the artist’s sculptures
are trances made tangibleSahand Hesamiyan
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY KEVIN JONESIranian sculptor Sahand Hesamiyan’s
studio is legendary in the Tehran
art world. “If you see only one
studio in the capital,” one artist
advised during my breakneck
three-day visit, “this is it.” Visitors
to the gargantuan space—gallerists,
guides, journalists, curators—walk
away impressed as much by its
scale as by the precision of the
work that unfolds inside its four
walls. Burrowed in the dusty
Khorramdasht Industrial Zone well
beyond the outskirts of town, off
the road leading to the storied
Mount Damavand, Hesamiyan’s
lair is a site where industry and
intricacy meet. His works—large,
reclining vessel-like sculptures,
each channeling a veritable
universe of elaborate, repetitive
patterns that recall Islamic
architecture—have been likened
to everything from vaulted domes
and futuristic pods to ornamental
projectiles. They conjure references
to Sufism, metaphysics, symbolismSahand Hesamiyan in his studio located
in Khorramdasht Industrial Zone, Iran.
and spiritualism, and are sculptural
marvels, sprung as much from
engineering as from poetics.
Every studio, for better or
worse, tells a story of origins—of
the process and method behind
a work, the persistent gestures
endowing it with form, the trial
and error shaping its fate. A
walk through Hesamiyan’s studio
reveals, above all, the syntax of his
large-scale sculptures. Individual
components loiter in silent piles,
waiting to be incorporated into the
final composition. These include
curving lattices, zigzagging ribs, the
wiry, cage-like oculus and sheets
of metal skin. Each element has a
specific function and is like a word
in a looming sculptural sentence.
For all their mass and scale, though,
the final works—clad, painted and
occasionally gilded—also retain the
lightness of the grid-like structures
from which they are built. Amid
the sounds of slicing, welding and
cladding that reverberate under thelofty, corrugated iron ceiling, one is
privy to the processes behind the
paradoxically appealing, space-
filling sculptures that are imposing
and monumental, yet seem to
barely touch the ground in serene
weightlessness.
Hesamiyan first came to the
Khorramdasht Industrial Zone—a
bustling enclave of potholed streets
and brick warehouses teeming
with metal workshops, carpentry
spaces, paint shops and the like—in
2008, a year after obtaining his
BFA in Sculpture from Tehran
University. Commissioned by the
Tehran Beautification Organization
(TBO) to create a sculpture at the
foot of Milad Tower, the capital’s
landmark, Hesamiyan needed a
studio space in which he could
build big. He rented a workshop,
where he produced Shams I (2008),
the 6-meter-by-6-meter work that
announced many of the artist’s
key preoccupations in geometry,
Islamic patterning, repetition, scale
and transparency.
After renting two other
workshops in the area, he set his
sights on his current studio in 2011.
Hesamiyan and a fellow sculptor
and classmate purchased the land,
and proceeded to build a space to
fit their specific needs. Pebbled
floors nudge up to brick walls,
crowned by a gently sloped tin-gray
ceiling crossed by black iron beams.
Sunlight streams in from either end
of the voluminous space through
expanses of rectangular windows.
A mezzanine housing a kitchen
and living area juts out from the
far back wall, accessed by a sturdy
staircase of wood and steel. Stained
worktables dot the space, as do at
least a dozen large wooden crates,
all marked “fragile.” A large area
slightly past the front entrance is
an arena of welding and soldering,
manned by mask-wearing workers
wielding fiery wands. “Here I have
the peace of mind to do what