Sahar Ghavami Tech-ocalypse (III) (2022)

framed: 26h × 21w cm

Acrylic on canvas

The artist writes: “This is a world after – or mid-during – a catastrophe so gradual we mistook it for progress”. Across three panels, the same forest breathes and dims: foxes curl among abandoned monitors and game controllers, cubs huddle in undergrowth. Nearby, a boy cradles his phone beside a fox he does not see, robots congregate beneath a tree where a fox sleeps, unbothered or simply exhausted. For Sahar Ghavami, the series is grounded in a specific reality: the decline of fox populations in Iran, “where habitat loss and human encroachment have pushed them steadily toward disappearance”. But her emphasis extends beyond geography: “it is the universal portrait of a species too absorbed in its own devices to notice what it is standing on, what it is slowly erasing”. In her work, animals are not secondary figures to human narratives of crisis. They are part of the same conditions, affected by the same shifts in environment, infrastructure, and attention. The scenes she constructs suggest a world where consequences are unevenly registered. The foxes remain present, but their position is increasingly precarious.