QUARANTARIUM consists of the two terms: quarantine and aquarium. This word creation is the title of a digital group exhibition in Tehran with the Austrian conceptual artist and architect Anita Steinwidder and the Austrian photographer Peter Garmusch, as well as the Iranian photographer Sassan Abri.
From December 1 to 31, 2020, this Austrian-Iranian photo exhibition, which can be virtually walked through in a 3D space, can be visited via the Instagram page and the website of the Austrian Cultural Forum Tehran in cooperation with the Mohsen Gallery Tehran.
The pandemic has forced people around the world to lock themselves in their homes and all their interactions and social contacts are reduced to the screens of their smartphones and computers. Quarantarium is a metaphor for our changed world, which has also changed ourselves and our conventional assumptions about the world.
In her works Anita Steinwidder takes into account the physical and architectural dimensions of the objects and interprets abstract forms in her pictorial works in a completely new way (photographed by: Klaus Fritsch). Here in her series: “Reconstruction – Mother and Father” she has taken a journey back to her childhood to rethink her alienated childhood in the country.
Peter Garmusch is a photographic artist who loves to explore close and remote geographical areas that are foreign to him and to travel without the feeling of having a home town himself. Due to the pandemic all his artistic plans are “on ice”. His physical and geographical routes became imaginary and subjective paths in his studio in Vienna. This led to the series: “Studio Vienna”. The frozen tongue doesn’t get a word in edgewise, the stomach struggles to digest, the ears hear, if at all, rigid narratives, the frozen testicles represent the masculine society and again the crisis of masculinity, but also the momentary inactivity of artists in pandemic times. Everything seems shock frozen.
Sasan Abri is an Iranian photographer of spaces, urban cityscapes and ephemeral moments in life. To execute his unique semi-impressionist techniques in his “Nest” series, he shifts the perspective of the background with that of the foreground. Human figures in the photo series are blurred and plant objects are made clear. The change in the relationship between subject and object is the result of the artist’s deliberations in Quarantine, when he experienced his self-imposed loneliness for several months.
