Artist Abbas Zahedi: ‘I hijack galleries as spaces to grieve’
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Although he didn’t realise it at the time, Abbas Zahedi — winner of this year’s Frieze Artist Award — made his first artwork in 2010. He was 26. It wasn’t a painting or a sculpture. It was an idea: that his local chippy, the Grove Fish Bar in Ladbroke Grove, west London, could become a philosophy symposium. The intention, for Zahedi and a group of friends, was to create a space in which they — children of migrants (Zahedi was born in London to Iranian parents, both of whom he lost at a young age) — could discuss why they “felt out of sync with the rest of society”. “[Many of us] were working-class, grew up on estates, and when we went to university we were in a really different demographic,” Zahedi says. He roped in friends willing to hold a conversation (or argument) about art, literature and philosophy. (Listening to Zahedi speak, over a coffee in late September, with an incredible onrush of thoughts peppered with references to Descartes, TS Eliot and Lyotard, delivered in his faint west London twang, was perhaps a taster.)