Taken collectively, the work of British-Swiss-Iranian artist, Aryana Sheibani, addresses meaning (or lack of), purpose (or lack of), and the discourse surrounding authorship and ownership.

In her work, fractured and incapacitated tools of the digital age become artefacts - not so much of a time past, but of a parallel universe in which these objects serve different, obscure functions. Inviting yet inconclusive, these defective tools (namely televisions and iPads) have been in different cases smashed (though not by the artist), etched into, woven over, framed, and exhibited. Sheibani here questions an object’s intended and its practiced use.

A large portion of Sheibani’s practice is rooted in historiography - the study of how history is written - and by and for whom these histories are intended. Inspired in part by the semantic and historiographical intrigue of ‘The Museum of Jurassic Technology’, an obscure private museum in Los Angeles, these works subvert the hierarchy in which exhibited artefacts or artworks profess truth, wisdom, or otherwise covetable information.* At what point in its life does an object cease serving its original function and instead serve another? At what point does its redundancy inspire growth?

*’The Museum of Jurassic Technology’, est. 1988, calls itself ‘an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic’. However, the term ‘Lower Jurassic’ is left undefined and the dawn of technology is more often associated with the scientific and industrial revolutions, occurring millions of years later than the jurassic.