A Bug’s Life

A Bug’s Life marks the first institutional solo exhibition of Berlin-based artist Arash Nassiri in Germany. The exhibition centers around the eponymous film, co-commissioned in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, and presented alongside two new series of sculptures developed for the exhibition at Fluentum.

Arash Nassiri’s (b. 1986, Tehran) practice draws on the visual grammar of television and cinema, bending these familiar forms into speculative, fable-like narratives. References to Tehran run through most of Nassiri’s works, not as a place he depicts directly but as a kind of roaming, half-remembered presence. Central to his work is a fascination with architecture as a carrier of memory: he treats buildings and interiors as sites where migration, displacement, and cultural mixing leave their trace.

The single-channel film A Bug’s Life (2025) follows an insect puppet on a surreal nocturnal journey through an opulent Beverly Hills mansion. Guided by strings and a pair of glowing eyes, the puppet creeps past marble floors, gilded staircases, and precious furniture, treating the house both as a wonder and a hazard. As it moves room to room, the film gradually discloses that this home is one of the last intact examples of the architecture created by Hamid Omrani, an Iranian architect who became sought after among wealthy diaspora families who settled in the United States after the 1979 revolution. His houses mixed disparate styles and eras into oversized, ornate compositions which came to be known, disparagingly, as "Persian Palaces" before Los Angeles banned them outright in 2004.

At Fluentum, A Bug’s Life is presented in dialogue with the building itself. The film is projected onto a semi-translucent structure connecting two of the venue’s monumental columns, situating viewers within a space whose own scale and materials carry a complex historical charge, rooted in the architecture of German fascism. Several newly commissioned sculptures by Nassiri also respond directly to questions of architectural scale. One series consists of architectural models, reminiscent of Hamid Omrani's original designs. Another features small insect motifs set into leftover marble fragments from Fluentum's renovation using pietra dura, a technique developed in 1600s Italy in which semi-precious stones are inlaid into a stone base.

Following presentations at Chisenhale Gallery in London and Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris, A Bug’s Life will open at Fluentum on September 9, 2026, on the occasion of Berlin Art Week. Alongside the exhibition, Fluentum will publish a book by Arash Nassiri that expands on the film’s exploration of Iranian-American domestic architecture through archival materials, newly commissioned texts by Théo Casciani and Hamed Khosravi, as well as visual research gathered during the development of A Bug’s Life.

Image credits: Arash Nassiri, A Bug’s Life (Still), 2026. Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Fluentum, Berlin; and Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris. Produced by Chisenhale Gallery. With support through residencies at Callie's, Berlin and Villa Albertine, Los Angeles. Headline Supporters: Fondation des Artistes and Fluxus Art Projects. With additional support from the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Circle. Courtesy of the artist and Ginny on Frederick, London.