Ali Dadgar: Disoriental
Closing Reception and Artist Talk

Ali Dadgar will be joining us remotely at 3 PM from his Oakland Studio

Sunday, April 24th, 2022

2 PM – 5 PM

Join us Sunday, April 24th, from 2 – 5 pm for the closing reception of Ali Dadgar’s solo exhibition DISORIENTAL. In addition to the closing reception, we are pleased to present a guided conversation between the artist and ADVOCARTSY founder Roshi Rahnama, which will begin promptly at 3 pm.

About the exhibition:

Drawing from a decades long fine art practice, DISORIENTAL explores universal themes of censorship, colonization, ‘otherness’, and identity filtered through the artist’s own Iranian and American experiences. DISORIENTAL is Ali Dadgar’s first solo exhibition with ADVOCARTSY and surveys a mad menagerie of complex, enigmatic works from several of Dadgar’s ongoing, multimedia series in an effort to navigate the artist’s darkly chaotic, yet distinctly authentic philosophical musings. By layering historical symbols, handwritten notes, photographs, self-portraits, and found materials from rugs to maps, Dadgar’s art maintains an undercurrent of dark humor that strives to recontextualize the unexpected. These elements are manipulated either digitally or manually, through painting or drawing, and form a new visual language – one of redaction, remapping, and erasure. Through autobiography and self-deprecation, Dadgar summons figures of otherness in a place filled with tradition, history, humor, and paradox.

Artist Biography:

Born in 1960s Iran, Ali Dadgar immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970s. He went on to receive his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, in 1989 followed by an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. He was a lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California Berkeley between 2006 and 2009 and is the recipient of multiple awards, including the UC Berkeley Outstanding GSI Award in 2007. His work has been placed in prominent private and public collections, including the University of California Berkeley Morrison Library.