Ali Fathollahi
Between Two Fans, 2018
Electric fan, electric heater
Courtesy of the artist

“It’s about communication, it’s about misunderstanding, and it’s about confusion.” Ali Fathollahi works primarily in assemblage, installation, and performance. Once an art professor at Islamic Azad University in his home city of Tehran, Iran, he moved to the United States over a decade ago and settled in Las Vegas. Social critique, which played a central role in the genesis of Between Two Fans, has always been an important aspect of his practice. “When I started working on that project I was thinking about the situation we had in society, and everything was going wrong, and there were lots of fights between different parties … It’s two persons standing in front of each other, just screaming their words without the other one understanding it; at the same time just wasting their energy,” he explains. The situation runs on into a frustrating stalemate. “Nothing is going to change.”
(DKS)