The Third Line is participating with more than 300 leading contemporary galleries at one of the most dynamic fairs in the world today. The Statements sector, one of eight categories at Art Basel, carefully selects proposals that present exciting new solo projects by young and emerging artists.

The works on display are fragments of a future science fiction film titled M-GOLIS, with Khorramian’s presentation focusing on paintings and objects related to the making. The animation, which is yet to be completed, will be the fifth in a series of films relating to the five elements of matter, earth, air, fire, water and ether, with M-GOLIS focusing on ether.

The narrative of M-GOLIS is set on a foreign planet of the same name in the year 2202. The planet, ravaged by chemical wastes, is sparsely populated with prisoners whose sentence is to reside there

and reverse the pollution by distributing mycoremediating mycelium spores that decompose toxic wastes. The film follows the journey of inmate Lieutenant Aurelio Swimm’s incarceration on the chemically polluted planet, where his consciousness has been altered by his extreme isolation and exposure to a toxic and increasingly hallucinogenic environment.

In one of the works, COMMUNICATION SHRINE, the artist presents an interactive installation that is housed within an ordinary refrigerator. Upon opening it, one encounters the world of Swimm more intimately through found objects, personal trinkets and three videos running simultaneously. Primarily intended as a communication portal to earth for the lone Lieutenant, this object has taken on a sacred totemic role, serving as an altar to things he considers precious in his solitary existence. By switching between her own creation, and that of her imagined character’s, Khorramian plays with multiple possibilities that allow her to examine the relationship between art and audience.

About Laleh Khorramian

Born in Tehran, Iran (1974), Khorramian lives and works in New York. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her undergraduate degree at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA at Columbia University, New York. Khorramian has exhibited internationally, including solo shows in New York, Vienna, and Dubai; as well as group shows in MOMA/PS1, U.S.A; MASS MOCA, U.S.A; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Istanbul Museum of Art, Istanbul; Queensland Museum of Art, Australia; Havremagasinet, Boden, Sweden as well as at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work is housed in several prominent collections including Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, Daman Collection, UAE and C-Collection, Principality of Liechtenstein. In 2013, she completed the Watermill Centre Residency in NY; recently published her limited edition artist book Include Amplified Toilet Water.

Khorramian’s work takes theatre and the spectacle as its point of departure, to explore aspects of human nature and emotional states of consciousness, and the possibilities of drawing as a medium. She works in a vacillating process of animation, monotypes and drawing as tools for story telling. Her work is based on the premise of experimenting with the process of chance for discovering possibilities of the unknown, whose details and outcomes she then investigates and repositions. Bizarrely personal and absurd, her pieces communicate the uncanny as a constructed parallel universe. From these investigations she attempts to open an unpredictable space where fiction can capture aspects of life that are normally invisible.