The Sky of the Seven Valleys
Ala Ebtekar will discuss his most recent work, “The Sky of the Seven Valleys,” delving into the intricate interplay between terrestrial and celestial elements that inform his studio practice.
In the University of Arizona School of Art’s first Visiting Artists & Scholars Endowment (VASE) lecture of the 2024-25 season, Ebtekar will illuminate how he synthesizes older traditions with contemporary technological advancements to create a unique artistic lexicon. He will explore how deep research, personal and collective narratives, poetry, and the phenomenology of light converge to form the basis for his explorations of time, space, identity and existence.
About the artist
For over two decades, Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a relentless leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. The artist’s extensive research and thoughtful methods borrow and physically rework thousand-year-old traditions of image/object-making up to the latest technological advances. Ebtekar’s recent investigations have created liminal experiences to longer notions of scientific duration beyond human timelines, in particular cosmic travel & the phenomenology of light. Considering light itself as both concept, medium, and even the possibilities of light as healing he uses a range of radiation in his practice, such as works birthed by daytime uv-light emitted from the sun, or night exposures that were produced by moonlight and starlight. With this method, his recent photographic works take a whole night to expose, continuing durational projects and works which he views as in collaboration with the sun and stars.
Moreover, Ebtekar equally over decades has employed the tactile traditions and properties of bookmaking, page and illumination in bound manuscripts, and classical training in Iranian coffeehouse painting. His alchemy of combining these legacies weave into his commitment and own work in tandem with enduring centuries of reclaimed text & image archives, poetry, and translation.
His work has been exhibited widely internationally and throughout the United States in such institutions as the British Museum, the Xinjiang Biennale, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, UAE, Asia Society in NYC, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, San Diego Museum of Art, The Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. Ebtekar has been awarded residencies at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles, Sazmanab in Tehran, Iran, and the San Francisco Center for the Book.
