In conversation: Pooya Abbasian

At Atelier MA, Lee Ufan’s exhibition space in Arles, large sheets of paper hang in washed shades of rose, acid green and dusk blue.

While they appear to be photographs of plants, these are actually photographs of a projection of a film of a plant, exposed onto gum-bichromate paper – a process that normally involves laying a negative flat against the sheet, but here uses a projector instead. By the time the image arrives, more than half the resolution is gone. In the next room, Japanese knotweed thrives inside a sealed Perspex case.

Pooya Abbasian made all these works in eight weeks, beginning in January, as the third laureate of the Lee Ufan Arles x Guerlain Art & Environment Prize.

While Soli-Sombre remains on view in Arles, Abbasian is preparing to exhibit in L’Heure des possibles, at Maison Guerlain on the Champs-Élysées from 21 October to 15 November. Organised in partnership with Art Basel Paris and curated by Hervé Mikaeloff and Benoît Baume, the exhibition brings together around thirty artists, including Christian Boltanski, Ann Veronica Janssens, Annette Messager, Laure Prouvost, Ugo Rondinone and James Turrell. The show explores how artists capture the changing light between day and night, a subject that connects with Abbasian’s experiments in exposing paper to moving images.

He also joins around forty artists in À partir de là (‘From There’), at the Centre d’art Ygrec–ENSAPC in Aubervilliers, north of Paris, from 3 October to 14 November. Bringing together artists who live, work or have lasting ties to the city, the exhibition considers the conditions that allow them to make a place there. It is also the centre’s last show before relocating to Cergy, giving questions of attachment and departure particular weight.

For Abbasian, those questions are personal. He made the Arles works while unable to reach his family in Iran. He arrived as nationwide protests broke out in his home country, with the state cutting internet access and the blackout continuing into the war that followed with Israel and the United States. He has not been allowed back to Tehran since 2011. None of this is directly referenced in the exhibition except in one film, where a radio plays in a farmer’s car, carrying news of the bombing while the farmer burns baccharis.

We spoke in Arles about what the Camargue region hides, why documentary lies more than fiction and how a short visit to France turned into fifteen unplanned years in Paris.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TS: Let me get a sense of how long you’ve been in Arles and what the residency has been like, because it’s quite an interesting city – quite multicultural, with quite a lot of poverty.

PA: I started the residency in January and stayed for the whole two months, and then I went back and forth between here and Paris. I wanted to have time here because I didn’t have a specific project in mind. I needed to be in the space, live in the space and see what the space was going to offer me.

TS: What did the city reveal to you that you hadn’t seen before?

PA: I had been to Les Rencontres d’Arles, and I knew the Camargue, but the thing I didn’t know was that the whole Camargue is artificial. The canals and the water – they manipulated and transformed the whole landscape to give us something we think is completely natural. What was fascinating was the state of transition and continuity, which has always been present in my work.

TS: The term ‘invasive species’ is interesting in itself: the species haven’t invaded; it’s humans who have made them do that. So there’s a weird tension in the language.

View of the exhibition ‘Soli-Sombre’, Lee Ufan Arles x GUERLAIN Art & Environment Prize, 2026 © David GIANCATARINA

PA: It’s the same story as salt production and rice cultivation. We took people from East Asia to grow rice, we took people from Greece to make salt, and made a village for these people. Now the question is what to do with them, which raises questions of migration. And the same thing happened with baccharis, which was brought over from North America many years ago because it was beautiful, but which has since become a problem. So we don’t want a plant to transform the landscape, but when humans transform it, that’s okay. When nature transforms it – that’s not okay.

And I followed this other plant, Japanese knotweed. It’s a fascinating plant because it was among the first plants to grow after the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, and it grows out of toxic soil. So nature itself reacted, and this plant is the result of trying to clean it. The other thing is that this plant is not toxic – it’s a source of food for animals, bees love it, even we can eat it. But still, it’s considered invasive. And in France you have to declare if you have it, and someone will come to eradicate it. But I’m quite naive: why can’t we all coexist? When it works for us, it’s good, but when it doesn’t work, it becomes bad. It’s the same story with humans and migration – it’s always this separation, where we cannot really coexist.

TS: At what point did you make the connection between an invasive plant and experiences of migration and globalisation?

PA: I come from painting, and then I worked in cinema. That led me to become preoccupied with questions of reality, the link between reality and images, and how images have become an international language. Especially how we consume images, now that everyone has become a photographer. I worked with filmmakers in Iran, like Abbas Kiarostami – I worked with Abbas in 2009 – and then I worked on productions with Jafar Panahi. There was this link between how people react to fiction and how people react to documentaries. I now understand that documentaries are much more manipulative in many ways, because a documentary is supposed to be reality, but it’s a fiction. Where you put the camera, which image you choose to take.

So I started to develop my work around truth, reality and images. Working in photography and video, I was also interested in what happens in between. I started to develop this technique of printing videos with a video projector and removing the physical negative to see the trace of time. I found this plant – actually a weed that Parisian hipsters love to buy – and it was the most ambiguous thing I had seen. I filmed the plant’s movement for 24 hours and started to project it, and it felt like painting with light, the light of the video. I did it layer by layer, colour by colour. It takes a long time, but it’s digital. After working in cinema production, I’m also a control freak. But here, I cannot control everything, and there are often accidental gifts, so I’ve learned to embrace them.

TS: Almost letting nature create the image. On the subject of Paris, how long have you been living there now?

PA: I didn’t move to Paris by choice. I’ve been in Paris for fifteen years now, because I was working on Jafar’s film This Is Not a Film, and it had a screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Because Jafar couldn’t leave the country, I came here to represent the film. I did some interviews about the film and about what was happening in Iran with the Green Movement, and they said: ‘Don’t come back, you are on the list.’ And I grew up in Tehran. It started with me staying for two months, which then turned into fifteen years. That’s also when I changed my practice, because when I was in Iran, I was obsessed with the idea of self-exoticising, and then I came to Europe and became that object myself, and I had to start again.

TS: And you’ve never been able to go back to Iran?

PA: I’ve never been back, no. But, in many ways, it’s easier this way. Nostalgia can sometimes be a dirty liar that makes you think the past was better, but I don’t have that. I have to look forward – it makes life easier.

TS: For many people who’ve migrated across the world, that’s a shared feeling.

PA: I always thought I would arrive, but then I understood there’s no arriving – there’s always this state of transition.

TS: I have a final question, and I ask it of all the artists I speak to: if you could invite five artists, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would you invite, and what would you cook for them?

PA: Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch, Matisse, Jonas Mekas, Agnès Varda – and I’d cook them fesenjān, an Iranian dish of duck with a walnut and pomegranate paste.