OSLO – Arash Nassiri: A Bug’s Life

Drawing on the visual languages of music videos, television and cinema, Tehran-born, Berlin-based artist Arash Nassiri reworks familiar formats into speculative and allegorical forms to examine how built environments absorb and reflect histories of migration, displacement and cultural hybridity. For his solo exhibition in Den Frie’s exhibition space OSLO, he presents his film A Bug’s Life (2026) alongside new sculptures commissioned specifically for Den Frie.

The exhibition takes us inside one of Beverly Hills’ so-called “Persian Palaces”, lavish villas built by Iranian emigrants following the Iranian Revolution in an architectural style banned by the City of Los Angeles in 2004. Tracing how Western architectural ideals travelled through Tehran and resurfaced in Beverly Hills as supposedly Iranian forms, Nassiri explores how architecture embodies cultural imaginaries, hierarchies of taste and unrealised dreams of the future.