Sahand Hesamiyan: Prolepsis

The unrealized artist project has an eerie appeal. It tugs at what was (an idea, an impression) and shines a light on what could be, evoking actions and processes that hover, suspended, incomplete. For many years, a curatorial fascination with the unrealized work has bubbled through artist interviews, exhibitions, catalogues, and critical writings. This curiosity for the ‘work that never was’ famously crystalized in the sole recurring question that curator/critic Hans Ulrich Obrist asked artists in his numerous interviews, prompting them to reveal (in speech, at least) the unseen, like peering into some idea abyss. The question of how to visualize the odd tangle of latency/potency held within the unrealized project came to a provocative head in the e-flux/Serpentine Gallery exhibition The Agency of Unrealized Projects (daadgalerie, Berlin, 2012). The gallery space became an archive: filing cabinets lining the walls behind a counter were manned by employees who would retrieve project-specific folders based on visitors’ requests. Within the folder, a dossier of an unrealized work detailed its stalled genesis, partial expression, or contingent execution. This ‘consultative’ mechanism added a further layer of distance between the intention of the works and their tangible future, as if they were embedded even more deeply into the coils of an intermittently accessible memory. 

Sahand Hesamiyan has chosen to open his memory, rather than sequester it. Prolepsis is a walk-through of five projects that were cancelled or curtailed for a variety of reasons–Covid, geopolitical angst, revolutionary eruptions. Some were intended for high-profile institutional shows such as Epic Iran at London’s V&A, whose ambitions were recalibrated during the pandemic; others were intended for Tehran gallery exhibitions, waylaid by protests reacting to the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini. Frequently navigating both succinct gallery spaces and sprawling public squares, Hesamiyan excels in the large-scale, the quasi-monumental, consistently integrating components of Iranian architectural heritage, both sacred and triumphant. The table-top works in Prolepsis flirt with their own dormant monumentality: the scale markings on each table arouse a sense of what their full-blown heft might be, while the dramatic spot-lighting seems to nudge the pieces into a looming grandeur. Yet we are reminded of their liminal status–between a work and the work–by the candidness of the deliberately non-plinth worktable, as if the artistic process might resume once visitors have departed. 

Ultimately, one could argue that nothing is fully realized until it is shown; that only engagement with the public completes a work. In this respect, Prolepsis is both an opportunity and a relief. These are Hesamiyan’s fantasies, his imaginings of how the monumental works could look, be executed, and installed. Like many fantasies, they were obsessive. The artist relates having returned to the works–and to the ideas for the works—repeatedly. As if caught in some Sisyphean loop, Hesamiyan confides to longing for a release from the cycle of continually revisiting the unfinished. Prolepsis is that release, of both mind and hand. It catalyzes not just a vitalized narrative of genesis and completion, but also a new form of artistic agency—one that revels in speculative power.