The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Wednesday February 25th — —

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Wednesday February 25th — —

“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Wednesday February 25th — —

King of Worms

We are very excited to premiere to the world this brand new series of phenomenal collages named ‘King of Worms’, which is the biggest project till date created by one of our favorite artists period: Ashkan Honarvar. The Norway-based visionary has been producing collages for almost a decade now, both under his own name as the pseudonym Who Killed Mickey, always finding inspiration in the dark side of humanity and from the questions that rise about it. The extraordinary new project is no different; consisting of 107 collages, divided in 10 chapters with a unique aesthetic, although undeniably marked with Honarvar’s signature style. It was inspired by a quote from Jane Arden’s film The Other Side of the Underneath, with the overall theme focussing on how power corrupts and is abused as well as the role men play in this misuse and women’s faith. In our eyes Honarvar succeeded tremendously in created something like a second personal layer for the film, which has almost mythical status amongst fans of radical, experimental cinema, because of its visionary and disturbing depictions of the mental state of its schizophrenic protagonist. Today we share a selection of the first 5 chapters of ‘King of Worms’, with the other half coming soon.

Our father king of worms, multiplier of numbers, we have made a cross section of the facts, and come up with murder. Strength, little girl, is madness and madness is the persistent belief in one’s own hatefulness. Lightning in the brain. Signals down the arm, persuading the fingers to conclude that which happened a very long time ago. When this light goes out we measure it against the sky. And the difference will ascertain the night of the witch howl. The night of the burning.’

— Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath, 1972

All of the incredibly talented Ashkan Honarvar’s art deals with the darker sides of the human mind through the undeniable and unavoidable beauty of the human body. The universal human body, used as tool for seeking identity, is the focal point of his work. By dissecting and rearranging images with careful aesthetic vision, Honarvar creates work with an intriguing macabre darkness. Since his graduation from the HKU University of the Arts in our hometown Utrecht in 2007 Ashkan has been making a name for himself with his tremendous collages. Themes like colonialism, war, mass destruction, megalomania and other grotesque behavior are all observable in his progressively growing body of work. We can’t get enough of his enthralling collages and love how the artist combines the abject with the aesthetic, creating images one can’t stop looking at.

We’ll introduce the second half of the 10 chapters in the coming days, including a little interview with Ashkan on his motivations and inspirations for ‘King of Worms’.

Follow Ashkan Honarvar here.