By creating a dialogue between the artist’s homeland and his adopted land, Bizhan Bassiri’s two works, Il Nottambulo and Meteorite – presented in a project curated by Bruno Corà at the Italian Embassy in Teheran as part of the “Giornate del Contemporaneo” – constitute a key to the artist’s entire poetics.
Meteorite appeared previously in the artist’s journey begun in 2009 in Belgium dedicated to the phenomenon of a meteorite’s fall, interpreted as a simultaneously dynamic and destructive event. It was followed in 2011 by the exhibition ‘La Caduta delle meteoriti’ (The Fall of the Meteorites) at the Museo Archeologico of Venice, and then in Teheran, where it landed on a sort of creative shore linking the man, the artist, to his native land and the universe. Il Nottambulo, on the other hand, expresses the condition of being half-awake, half-asleep; imbued with a cosmic spirituality, this state is a constant presence in all of Bassiri’s work.

In Manifesto of Magmatic Thought, to which in effect these works belong, we read, “The existence of the work of art in the world is a meteorite arriving from the cosmos; it does not belong to the earth but appears to it (…) The meteorite of unknown origin is intuition.”

The installation in the Iranian National Museum was accompanied by a screening of the documentary film, Il Canto del Tempo del Pensiero Magmatico, by director Ali Eskandari.