TJ Shin and Abbas Zahedi
Condo London
Hosted by Phillida Reid
Ehrlich Steinberg is pleased to present Y/N, a two-person exhibition by LA-based artist TJ Shin and London-based artist Abbas Zahedi for the 2025 edition of Condo London. The gallery is hosted by Phillida Reid who is presenting a three-person exhibition by Lea Cetera, Prem Sahib and Edward Thomasson.
Y/N includes separate sculptures by Shin and Zahedi, exploring themes of intertextuality, authorship, and the elusive qualities of language through forms that appear at first familiar. The exhibition takes its title from the fanfiction practice of replacing a protagonist’s name with “Y/N”, an acronym for “your name”, which allows a reader to insert themself into the story.
TJ Shin’s work is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ 1939 story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, which examines the discursivity of meaning in identical texts created in different contexts and historical periods. Shin reimagines Borges’ fiction through seminal works from the British literary canon—Jane Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ 1861 Great Expectations and Virginia Woolf’s 1925 Mrs. Dalloway—which have shaped national and domestic identities from the Victorian to modern eras. Presented as two series of hand-bound artist books, the first offers a verbatim reinterpretation of these classic texts recast through the tradition of historical fiction. The second series, identical in form and language functions as a reinterpretation of the first, further probing the signifying practice of meaning, value, and identity. Visitors are encouraged to handle the work, emphasizing the interactive nature of interpretation.
Abbas Zahedi’s 2020 How To Make A How From A Why? hand towel unit features a hand towel unit imprinted with a lost fragment from the artist’s poem MANNA from below. Employing language that is at once rhetorical, accusatory, and resigned, the sculpture places an unknown first-person narrator opposite an addressed subject. The work’s implicit functionality, like Shin’s, invites engagement both physically and linguistically. The recursive nature of the spinning towel and the cyclical text create an existential loop, where the meaning of language emerges through the dynamic relationship between viewer, artist, and artwork, as amplified by the repetitive act of engagement.
As suggested by the exhibition’s title, Shin and Zahedi implicate the visitor within the daisy-chain of (re) interpretation. For both artists, evolving notions of originality and authorship disrupt established readings within their works and the language they employ.
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Image credit: Benjamin Westoby