Ali Ahadi (b. Tehran, Iran. 1984) is an Iranian-Canadian Vancouver based artist and writer. His interdisciplinary practice spans from site-specific ephemeral installations to sculpture, photo and video based works. Consisting of representational images, composite objects and text projections, that propose certain ways of approaching particular conceptual dualities, Ahadi’s work is constituted through addressing the problems of presentation and representation, monsteration and demonstration, and finally, through entangling the relationship between aesthetics and contingent forms of abstractions that are not necessarily reducible to the conventional artistic determination, within politically charged situation. In Ahadi’s work, the artistic is contingent, and thus, it may happen, not within the aestheticized object, but through creation of particular situations in which the presence of heterogeneous and multiple dualities induces transformation of an informe into a new form.
Both his artistic and scholarly methodologies involve dealing with the roles that the questions of “contingency” and “Event” play in the praxis of art and the politics of Subjectivization.
His current research focuses on the concepts of “thought-activism”, and “the poetics of that which is not”, concerning the possibilities of rupturing within the established system of knowledge that determine both the discursive as well as the material practices of art and politics.
Ahadi’s practice also involves writing and translating seminal literatures, mostly in continental philosophy, aesthetics and politics, into Farsi.
In 2012 he received his MFA in visual arts from the University of British Columbia, wherein he currently is a PhD candidate in continental philosophy and critical theories.