OSLO – Arash Nassiri: A Bug’s Life

Arash Nassiri’s work explores the legacy of Western influence on Tehran. His practice draws on the visual languages of music videos, television, and cinema, reworking familiar formats into speculative and allegorical forms. His work often examines how built environments absorb and reflect histories of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity.

For his solo exhibition at OSLO, Nassiri presents a new commission made specifically for Den Frie alongside his film A Bug’s Life, which focuses on a mansion in Beverly Hills built by Iranian émigrés in the 1980s. Designed by architect Hamid Omrani, the mansion is among the last surviving examples of this architectural style, which was outlawed by the City of Los Angeles in 2004.

Moving through the house is a small, hand-carved wooden insect. The puppet wanders through its lavish interiors, tracing polished surfaces, ornamental details, and gold-toned décor while inhabiting a building caught between different places and histories. Through this strange and playful encounter, Nassiri brings an architectural fragment of the Iranian diaspora to life through an animation that is uncanny yet innocent.