A stroll through a garden of earthly blights
Artist replicates plant samples from ancient Babylon site spoiled by Saddam Hussein
On the floor of Mercer Union’s crisp, white Bloor St. exhibition space, jagged shards of bronze and plaster lie in tidy display on old bed sheets.
First blush provokes a flood of associations: a reliquary of ancient, sacred objects; a disaster recovery effort; or burial shrouds, with remains to be bundled then committed to the earth.
Each is true in its own way, but the one certain thing is that it is all the work of Abbas Akhavan, a 37-yearold Iranian-Canadian who is one of five finalists for this year’s $100,000 Sobey Art Award.
The show here and the award have nothing to do with each other, aside from a welcome corrective to a local blind spot. As Akhavan’s international reputation has grown, he’s been all but invisible here, in his nominal hometown. That’s partly by his own design — “I come here to not be an artist,” says Akhavan, smiling impishly — but his new show, variations on a garden, is an about-time, Sobey or not.
The work, a series called Study for a Monument, is fragments of various flora: stems and leaves, flowers and roots. They’ve been cast in bronze but appear charred or excavated — finds, maybe, from an ancient ruin.
The last part is at least half-true. Akhavan spent years researching plant-life samples culled from the Tigris River valley in Iraq, the site of ancient Babylon and the mythical Hanging Garden.
Legend had it that the gardens, rooted in the most nourishing soil on Earth, gave rise to an unimaginably magnificent natural splendour.
It disappeared as Babylon did, leaving behind a wealth of more humble plant life. But the fascination with the region led scientists from London’s Kew Gardens to an ongoing research effort to catalogue the plant life.
Babylon, of course, would rise again at the hand of Saddam Hussein, who in1983 engaged slave labour to lay 60 million bricks to rebuild the great palace of Babylon’s ruler, King Nebuchadnezzar II; in an unintended irony Hussein had the river delta drained to make way for the 600room palace, killing much of the plant life in the process.
Into this tangled history, Akhavan inserts his own gesture. His relics, drawn from the Kew archive and others, aren’t faithful reproductions of the botanists’ archive, but hand- made replicas far larger than scale.
A thistle, to choose one example, is the size of a human fist. With its spiked bristles, it reads like a deadly weapon — appropriate given the history of the land that once nurtured it.
The broken leaves and branches, which he sculpted in wax by hand and then cast in bronze, recall nothing so much in size as human limbs: an abrupt break from botanical taxonomy into the gruesome business of the human cost of trauma and war.
A small video piece in an adjacent gallery puts a finer point on it. Video clips culled from social media show American soldiers staging surprise homecomings for the camera. Wives shriek and wail with equal parts shock and joy; children erupt with uncontainable affection.
Akhavan calls it Ghost and it is everything variations on a garden is not: explicit, not subtle; aggressive, not contemplative, and powerfully, emotionally exploitive.
A soldier may record his own history with the array of tools at hand these days, but variations on a garden seems to suggest that even benign-seeming histories — of plants, no less — can unlock unimagined meaning and traces of disaster. In the merciless churn of history, everyone is either conqueror or victim, even those things that grow roots in the earth. Abbas Akhavan: variations on a garden continues at Mercer Union to Oct. 31. The Sobey Art Award will be presented Oct. 28 in Halifax.