Dastan is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Shiva Yourdkhani titled “The Playground, Where Material and Intervention Meet” at Dastan’s Basement. The exhibition will open on Friday, 11 June, 2021, and will be open on display for public viewing until June 25. Her first solo show at Dastan’s Basement, this exhibition features an installation of three-dimensional works and video screening. Situated in the gap between life and art, “The Playground, Where Material and Intervention Meet” indicates the formal and environmental consciousness of the artist, where she directly engages with the material and incorporates her surrounding environment in her creative process. Affected by the unstable and rapidly-changing socio-economic situation, Shiva Yourdkhani’s choice of easily-accessible material as well as her fluid production process –where the objects are made without any preparatory sketch in mind– create a sense of instability. Fashioned in abstract forms with no specific function, the objects assume a life of their own when placed in different contexts. In her engagement with both the material and the environment, the artist enters into a subjective realm in which indistinctive forms and undefined material are aesthetically comprehensible when located in gaps and empty spaces. In “The Playground, Where Material and Intervention Meet” both the material and the space are used as territories for artistic expression. /// Shiva Yourdkhani (b. 1984, Tehran, Iran) is multimedia artist and a graduate of painting from Tehran University of Arts. Moving away from painting to experience other forms of expression, Shiva Yourdkhani started using new media to highlight the socio-economic dimensions of her artistic perception. The significance of environment in her practice indicates the connection between an artist’s lived experience and their artistic expression.