Z33 presents first European solo show for artist duo Pejvak

Z33 presents the first European solo exhibition of the artist duo Pejvak (Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson), consisting of entirely new work.

If Need Be is a constellation of stories about water scarcity. The exhibition leads you to the arid regions of Central Asia, the steppes of Mongolia, ancient Persia, and the American Great Plains. Pejvak strings together a series of hallucinatory events involving artificial glaciers, dams in the desert, and other human attempts to bring water under control.

Giving equal weight to gossip, legend and historical fact, Pejvak takes the role of an unreliable narrator, situating the struggle for water within the struggle for the historical record. In this way, they draw attention to the role of imagination in history writing. How much of the past has been fabricated? Which version do we believe?

About the works

Ranging from sculptures over miniatures with Soviet propaganda to installations with water tanks, Pejvak shows only new work in this exhibition. In the document below you will find a short description of each work. 

About the artists

Pejvak is the long-term collaboration between Rouzbeh Akhbari (IR, 1992) and Felix Kalmenson (RU, 1987). T They are currently artists in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Their recent solo exhibitions include: In Its Place, Only Steel, State Silk Museum, Tblisi (2019); Make Breeze, Hay Art Cultural Center, Yerevan (2018); and Tides of Sand and Steel, Si Shang Art Museum, Beijing (with Ash Moniz, 2017). Upcoming group exhibitions include: Eurasia: A Landscape of Mutability, M HKA, Antwerp (2021) and Rewinding Internationalism: The 1990s and Today, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2022). Pejvak’s films have been screened at numerous film festivals worldwide, such as Docs Lisboa, Sharjah Film Platform, and Kasseler Dokfest. Their first feature-length film, Threshold, was recently premiered at the 44th Mostra Internacional de Cinema, São Paulo.

In collaboration with:

Mojtaba Abu Talebi, Timur Akhmetov, Javad Azari, Masoud Borbor, Dina Cheraghvand, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt & Sasha Shestakova), Benjamin Filler, Hamid Ghezlou, Rudy Guedj, Bahar Modiri, Irakli Qolbaia, Anisa Sabiri, Farshad Tavakoli, Lisa Vetkhova

Practical information

If Need Be: 12.06 - 22.08.21

Curator: Tim Roerig