Pooya Abbasian — Maltournée

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the short film Maltournée. The film depicts a missed opportunity to engage with a community of refugees and asylum-seekers living along the Saint-Denis canal, near the Stade de France, who were abruptly evacuated by the police and disappeared. Abbasian poetically documents their traces, evoking the emotions, situations, and objects that once filled this no-man’s-land; through the use of tracking shots, dialogue, and voice-over, he captures the intense presence of their absence. The film was produced with the support of the Wim Wenders Foundation as part of a project in which six Iranian filmmakers, mentored by Wenders, explored the theme “A Sense of Place” in Iran or in exile.

The exhibition also includes parts of broken toilets or sinks that the artist found in the suburbs. He transforms these porcelain objects using a process inspired by photographic emulsions, making their surface photosensitive and then projecting images onto them via video using photographs taken near the site where the objects were found. This unpredictable process results in delicate, precarious images that transform the fragments into fossils, fragile remnants of an abandoned place haunted by its past, existing somewhere between memory and fantasy.

Pooya Abbasian

Pooya Abbasian, born in 1985, is an Iranian artist based in Paris since 2011. A long-time collaborator of Iranian director Jafar Panahi, he has screened his films in numerous art spaces and film festivals, including the Pejman Foundation, the CPH-DOX Dokumentary Filmfestival Copenhagen, the Pictoplasma Festival Berlin, and the BelDocs Festival in Belgrade.

Abbasian’s work is in the collection of the CNAP (French National Contemporary Art Collection) and has been shown in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, le Plateau Frac-Île de France, the Grande halle de la Villette, Poush, and the Association La Source-La Guéroulde. An illustrator and author since 2016, he has also written and illustrated several children’s books published by Gallimard and Actes Sud. He is currently part of the artist residency programme 2023-2024 at the Fondation Fiminco.