Shagha Ariannia

Septieme Gallery Paris is pleased to present Five More Minutes of Collective Agony, the first international solo exhibition by Iranian painter based in Los Angeles, Shagha Ariannia.

Five More Minutes of Collective Agony is LA-based artist Shagha Ariannia’s first solo exhibition in France. The artist presents a series of new works on canvas that imagines a world in which spaces of collective assembly provide fertile ground for camaraderie, tenderness and kinship amidst upheaval and feelings of isolation, a space in which crowds transform into communities.

These paintings compose bodies in various states of solitude and embrace. The intimacy is violent, the expression of support is sexual — bodies expressing exhaustion become capable of asphyxiating each other. Ariannia proposes a bodily voracity in which self-pleasure and support exist in an insatiable black vacuum. In the context of today’s political violence against female sexuality and freedom, the paintings reclaim the female collective body as one to be feared.

Born and raised in Iran, Shagha Ariannia (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Ariannia grew up in an authoritarian regime, where public behavior was under government control, and as a result her interests are situated in the contrast between public and private behavior, examining the politics of the body and its desires in relation to sexual norms.

Inspired by feminist writers such as Kathy Acker or Kris Kraus as well the poets of Iran (Forough Farokhzad), Ariannia’s uses auto-fiction as a strategy for image making. Her practice at large continuously engages with questions of vulnerability and doubt, intimacy and desire, shame, love and awkwardness.

Her works have been exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Meliksetian Briggs Gallery, University of California Irvine; LAX Art; 18th Street Art Center; Commonwealth and Council; the Torrance Art Museum, Galarie der Hochschule, Braunschweig, Germany and Gallery Momo, Capetown. She received her MFA from CalArts and BA from the University of California, Irvine. She is a 2016 recipient for the California Community Foundation Fellowship and attended Bemis Residency in fall 2018.