Art & Culture

Next Big Thing: Panteha Abareshi

November 30, 2022

Prosthetic leg with adjustable components on a table, surrounded by measurement tools and padding. — Panteha Abareshi, A Demolition Site, (2022). Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Through a finely honed aesthetic of therapeutic nihilism, Los Angeles artist Panteha Abareshi crafts sculptures that lay bare ableist hegemony. A Bundle of Kindling (2022), a pair of anthropomorphized crutches attached to a makeshift IV pole, is adorned with an IV bag bearing their 2017 hospitalization label and medical records number. Abareshi’s singular practice is as much a critique of normalized physicality as an archive of their own degenerative blood disorder, which causes debilitating pain.

Medical equipment with wires and a plastic cover on a metal stand with wheels, set on a concrete floor. — Panteha Abareshi, A Shallow Wound, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Subject matter: “The medical gaze is the way that the disabled and sick body is imagined and seen, infantilized, defined in a violently dehumanizing way. It exists everywhere and within everyone to some degree, often subconsciously.”

Person with braided hair and tattoos sitting in a wheelchair by a large window with a cityscape view. — Panteha Abareshi. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

“Panteha vulnerably questions the mechanics of their own body by abstracting projections the medical-industrial complex has imposed on them”

Source material: “I have a huge collection of medical ephemera I’ve been collecting for over ten years, all things that have been used on me in the hospital and from hospitals that I’ve stayed at, medical items that I consider traces of my illness of my own existence.”