seen-/unscene: Babak Modarresi & Sohrab Kashani
About this activity.
D(EE)GARI is a collaboration between Babak Modarresi and Sohrab Kashani that builds a shifting language for the estrangement of encountering something that should feel familiar and doesn’t, or shouldn’t and does. Images, situations, and fragments are gathered before they disappear and held open to multiple readings at once, resisting any single account of what they are or where they belong. Recombined with other material and stripped of the meaning they arrived with, they shift medium, shape, material, and essence across the processes they pass through, giving way to hybrid objects, speculative environments, and worlds that don’t fully resolve, where the estrangement stays present and where Babak and Sohrab find themselves as much as they find the material.
At SIGN, this method is tested in physical space and in public for the first time. A single scene, a temporary virtual storage, built beforehand from the shared archive the two of them keep developing, holds everything produced and shown at SIGN. Objects drawn from it take partial physical form, some standing on their own, some grafted into objects already present. During the first part of their time at SIGN, new objects keep being produced from it. During the second part, these join what was already on view when the studio opened, and SIGN turns from a working space into an exhibition.
First opening ~ SIGN as studio: 11 September 2026, 17:00 hrs.
Studio days: 11–17 September 2026
Second opening ~ SIGN as exhibition: 18 September 2026, 17:00 hrs.
Exhibition days: 18–27 September 2026
Finissage: 27 September 2026, 17:00 hrs.
Artist talk: 27 September 2026, 18:00 hrs.
SIGN
Winschoterkade 10
9711 EA Groningen
Open: Tue-Sat 12-17 & Sun 14-17 hrs
Instagram: @sign.projectspace
D(EE)GARI Website: https://deegari.nl
Instagram: @d_ee_gari
Biographies
Babak Modarresi (b. 1996) is a multimedia and digital media artist working across video games, VR, digital media, installation, print, moving image, and 3D-printed objects. Modarresi’s practice treats artistic production as a language for navigating experiences that resist straightforward expression. Drawing from personal experience, collective memory, internet subcultures, and vernacular digital aesthetics, he explores how uncertainty, doubt, and the absurd can be translated into visual and spatial forms.
Links
Website: https://babakmodarresi.com
Instagram: @beelzee.bob
Sohrab Kashani (b. 1989) is an artist-researcher working across virtual environments, video, sound, installation, performance, writing, and collaborative practice. Through glitches, duplications, and speculative interventions, Kashani explores how bodies and spaces shape, disrupt, and reconfigure one another, within social, political, and institutional conditions. Kashani is co-founder of Rabt and founder of Sazmanab, independent art spaces that now continue as roaming artistic, curatorial, and research studios.
Links
Website: https://sohrabmk.com
Instagram: @museumofsohrab
SIGN.
SIGN is een levendige en experimentele projectruimte voor actuele interdisciplinaire kunst op nationaal niveau. Zij biedt jonge kunstenaars een podium voor verdere profilering, ontwikkeling en intensivering van hun kunstenaarschap. Daarbij wordt nieuw werk geïnitieerd in bijzondere contexten en wordt de nodige reflectie gegeven. Presentaties zijn er in SIGN, op allerlei locaties, en in openbare ruimte met een variatie aan omstandigheden, invalshoeken, disciplines.
SIGN wordt ondersteund door Mondriaan Fonds Kunstpodium Basis 2025-2028 en door de Gemeente Groningen voor dezelfde periode.
Location.
SIGN
Winschoterkade 10
9711 EA Groningen
tel 050-3132651 of 0623631796
www.sign2.nl