Abbas Zahedi

SB: Yet keeping the dialogue flowing forward is not easy, is it?

AZ: I’ve been fortunate to experience a wide range of group dynamics over the years — from clinical to community-based— and that’s where I began to understand that the rhythm of a group, the pacing of silence and speech, is itself the work. My background in medicine and training in psychiatry gave me a foundational sense of structure and safeguarding, but it was really through being on the other side — as someone in long-term, intensive treatment — that I started to grasp the subtleties. I learned how it feels when a group holds together well, and how quickly it can fracture under the weight of too much talk, too little trust, or a lack of care in how people are met.

SB: It is unusual for a museum to host this kind of format

AZ: I remain deeply grateful to the curators and to Catherine Wood, Head of Programming, for placing their trust in me. From the very beginning, I made it clear that I didn’t want to treat the gallery as simply a place for looking. I asked: What does it mean to witness, rather than observe? That shift—from passive spectatorship to shared presence—shaped the entire approach. The support groups weren’t an afterthought or outreach initiative; they were the basis of my invitation to do this show, as I had already developed this blended model of exhibition-making from the start of my practice.

There’s an ongoing idea in art that what makes something valuable is its separateness—its exceptionality, its distance from the everyday. But I think what feels most rare now is the chance to come together without spectacle, without needing to produce a reaction or result. So instead of stripping away function to elevate form, I’m trying to fold form back into the texture of use—into the rituals, rhythms, and needs that people carry with them. Part of this is about reframing what a cultural space can hold. If culture emerges wherever surplus allows for reflection, then what happens when that surplus is emotional or relational, rather than economic? That’s the territory this work moves through—where meaning arises not just from what is shown, but from what is shared.

SB: We talked about the inadequacy of the words ‘secular spirituality’, or whatever one to tries to call it. Do you think we are still searching for that phenomenon?

AZ: Within liberal, secular, and so-called progressive spaces, questions of metaphysics or meaning beyond the material are often sidestepped, as if admitting to them might unravel the whole framework. But evasion doesn’t erase the need — it just pushes it elsewhere.

In some ways, we’ve replaced the symbolic and spiritual of religion with cultural forms that don’t fully carry the same weight. Art, in this context, becomes a placeholder — a space where certain yearnings for coherence, transcendence, and collective ritual can flicker, but not quite find anchorage. And so we inherit this unease: culture wants to be autonomous and immanent, but it still bears the trace of its theological roots. What I’m trying to do in my work is to make room for that contradiction — not to solve it, but to hold it. I’m not interested in offering redemption narratives or spiritual templates. But I do believe, that people carry forms of grief, uncertainty, and longing that can’t be resolved through critique alone. And I think the gallery, when treated not just as a site of display but as a space of encounter, can become a container for those unresolved energies.

SB: So, what does that personally mean for you?

AZ: I think much of what we call contemporary art in the West — especially shaped by a Eurocentric, secular worldview— operates under the assumption that we’ve outgrown the need for metaphysics. That we’ve somehow progressed beyond collective ritual or existential longing. And I say that as someone who is very much a product of this contemporary condition. I don’t practice within a religious tradition, and I don’t claim a spiritual lineage in any orthodox sense — but I come from a highly enchanted beginning, and I carry with me a strong sense of what, in Hegelian terms, might be called spirit. Not spirit in a mystical or transcendental way, but as a lived, collective undercurrent — a force of presence, memory, and becoming, that moves through people and places, often without needing to be named.

In many liberal art contexts, there’s room for spirituality — but usually only when it comes pre-framed by heritage, cultural distance, or otherness.

SB: Art and spiritual practice as an exotic curiosity

AZ: What we’re dealing with here is not simply a curiosity about spiritual practices or cultural otherness — it’s the residue of a deeper historical logic, one bound up with a distinctly Euro-American, post-Enlightenment view of history: linear, teleological, and ultimately eschatological. In this worldview — whose scaffolding is as much Judeo-Christian as it is post-religious — time is imagined as a forward-moving arrow, ever progressing from superstition to science, myth to modernity, ritual to rationality. Anything that lies outside of this chronology is not only rendered obsolete but patronized — exoticized as a cultural artifact, rather than recognized as a mode of meaning still very much at work in the present.

This linearity governs not just how we tell stories about religion or culture, but how we structure knowledge itself. In medical school, for instance, you’re taught to trace the path from the four humors to penicillin to genomic sequencing — as if each step renders the last one redundant. To invoke humoral theory today is laughable in clinical terms, but that laughter conceals an act of forgetting: namely, that every system of knowledge carries with it a metaphysics — a worldview, a social imaginary, a way of relating to life, death, and the body. What gets discarded isn’t just outdated science; it’s a whole cosmology.

We do the same with spiritual practices in art. Once these practices are no longer tethered to organized religion or cultural tradition, they are either dismissed as irrational or safely domesticated into aesthetic categories: “the mystical,” “the shamanic,” or “the folkloric.” As long as these forms are quarantined within heritage or identity, they’re permitted to circulate. But the moment a secular subject begins to gesture toward the metaphysical — without institutional backing or cultural credentials — the discomfort sets in. The system lacks the vocabulary, so it reaches for containment or critique. And yet the need persists. The desire for rituals, for a collective grammar of grief — none of that has disappeared. What’s shifted is the ground on which it all used to rest. For much of the liberal-progressive worldview, “nature” became the last standing surrogate for metaphysical cohesion — a kind of green-washed theology. We may have abandoned God, but we held fast to the Earth as a symbolic reservoir: provider, witness, balm. Nature became the placeholder for all that secular reason couldn’t quite resolve. It was the last shared site of enchantment.

But now nature itself is unstable. Climate collapse has made it unfit for symbolic outsourcing. We can no longer project transcendence onto a world that is itself unraveling. And so the absence returns — not as a theological question, but as an existential one: what now holds us together? What do we gather around when even the ground is giving way?

This is what my work is wrestling with — not as illustration but as infrastructure. The piece isn’t just a sculpture or a soundscape. It needs time, recurrence, unpredictability, support groups, somatic rituals, and shared silences. Because I’m not trying to represent the crisis — it’s to ritualize our encounter with it. Not to aestheticize collapse, but to hold space within it.

SB: You challenge the old terms and frameworks which is so necessary for art grappling with wider environmental and societal shifts now

AZ: Coming into art from medicine — and from years of instability, including periods of practical homelessness — means I don’t take the art world’s assumptions for granted. I wasn’t inducted into a system that taught me to see art as a commodity, something to collect, display, or leverage for status. For a long time, I was exhibiting work while living between temporary spaces. So the idea of art as domestic décor or investment just wasn’t in my frame of reference. It wasn’t even legible to me. What that gave me, though, was clarity: that art had to be more than an object — it had to be a site of relation, a holding space. A way to move through grief, transition, and uncertainty — and to connect across social and emotional thresholds that weren’t otherwise being acknowledged. For me, making work wasn’t about building a career; it was a survival strategy. Something had to hold what wasn’t being held elsewhere.

That’s still the foundation for me. Even as my context has shifted, that early urgency hasn’t left. I’m not trying to position my practice within a market logic or historical lineage. I’m asking whether the work can host something real — something needed — in the moment we’re living through. That’s the measure that matters to me. Can it carry people through or hold something that might otherwise go unspoken? That’s what I keep returning to.

SB: So that difficult journey still informs your art.

AZ: Part of that journey has been about recognizing the structures of meaning I came from. Growing up in a religious household, meaning was inherited — passed down, protected, and carried forward. There’s a sense of vertical transmission in that: you don’t choose meaning, you receive it. Later, through philosophical inquiry, art school, and making work, I encountered a different model — meaning as something you generate from the ground up, through experience, material, and relation. That’s the classic position art tends to champion: meaning from below. It’s embodied, immanent, performative. But what I’ve come to is a need to hold both registers — without necessarily believing in them — but with a sensitivity to what each one offers, and the conditions that give them shape.

In my installations, I try to reflect that. I work with ceiling height, suspended objects, vertical scales — not just for effect, but to suggest that there’s still a ‘beyond’ worth invoking, even if we don’t name it. At the same time, the work remains grounded: in the body, in breath, in shared space. The art space, for me, is one of the last public environments where we can collectively examine how meaning is made — not just received or consumed, but interrogated.

SB: Yes, and we experience that in your Tate show

AZ: I have two works in London right now that occupy opposite ends of a spectrum — one high up at Tate Modern, the other underground in a nightclub in the center of town. The Tate installation is ambient, designed around resonance and collective support. The nightclub piece, It’s your turn to be, curated by Bianca Chu as part of her Nocturn program, is breath-driven, visceral, rooted in the physical intensity of sound systems and shared movement. They operate at different frequencies, but they remain in dialogue. One invites stillness and reflection; the other, rhythm and trance— a choreography of presence at different altitudes. Both works explore how meaning and connection are shaped by environment. Whether through silence or bass, rest or repetition, they offer ways to gather — not always to understand, but to attune.

SB: Chu talked about the club as becoming through your work a ‘cybernetic’ or ‘sentient body’. Would you explain what this means?

AZ: Yes, that same dialectic — of meaning from above and below — applies just as much to how I engage with institutions. Art spaces, especially within this Euro-American canon, tend to inherit a kind of clerical structure. They distribute meaning from the top down, like ecclesiastical authority dressed in minimalist architecture. The artist, in this frame, becomes something like a minor prophet: granted space, given a voice, but expected to speak in tongues that align with institutional decorum.

I’ve always found myself more attuned to other terrains — music cultures, diasporic gatherings, nightlife infrastructures — places where meaning isn’t handed down but improvised in real-time. There’s no manifesto on the wall in a club toilet, but there might be a voice note looping through the speaker, misfiring with enough distortion to suggest something more honest. The club isn’t a utopia, but it remains one of the last surviving zones where bodies cohere around rhythm instead of rhetoric. That, to me, is a serious cultural proposition — not decorative, nor supplemental.