beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Born in 1985, Pooya Abbasian is a French-Iranian artist who has lived and worked in Paris since 2011. Through a multidisciplinary practice encompassing photography, drawing, video and installation, his work explores our contemporary relationship with images in the post-media era. He examines how images are constructed, circulated and received. For him, images emerge through both fragmentation — one image inscribed in space can give rise to a thousand others — and irruption, through their dependence on and emancipation from a visual economy that shapes our modes of perception and frameworks of interpretation.

A collector of documentary images found online, stills captured from films, and photographs taken with his own camera during his travels, he uses these materials as the raw material for his visual compositions and fictions. These images, recorded, preserved and transformed, allow him to reveal the paradoxical relationship between the image and our understanding of reality or truth. The language that emerges from these transformations also finds expression in the short films he makes. Transitional spaces, whose ambiguity interests him more than their certainties, become anchor points where the relationships between time, memory and place are played out anew. It is within this inframince — the imperceptible interval — that he seeks connections between media, giving rise to poetic accidents.

His films have been screened at numerous art centres and festivals. In 2026, he was awarded the Lee Ufan Arles Art and Environment Prize. In 2025, the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin devoted a retrospective to his work. His work has been exhibited at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in 2024, at Le Plateau – FRAC Île-de-France in 2022, and at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. His works are held in the collections of the CNAP (National Centre for Visual Arts) and the MEP. He has also written and illustrated several children’s books published by Gallimard and Actes Sud.

In Dubio offers a retrospective of ten years of the artist’s practice, presenting a reading of his images enriched by the intersecting perspectives of theorists, curators, friends and writers who have contributed to the development of his thinking and the making of his work.

Texts by: Yasmin Naderi Afschar, Noélie Bernard, Thibault Boulvain, Clément Chéroux, Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Laurie Hurwitz, Morad Montazami, Julian Stallabrass, Clémentine Proby, Élodie Royer and Ryoko Sékiguchi.

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