The Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg has launched two major exhibitions: a career-spanning survey of Iranian-born artist Ali Banisadr and a site-specific installation by Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson. Banisadr’s exhibition, "The Alchemist," features nearly 20 years of work including large-scale paintings that blend abstraction with intricate, emerging figures. Accompanying this is "The Last Library IV: Written in Water," a life-sized library constructed from corrugated cardboard that explores the fragility of the written word and the impact of censorship and AI on language.
These exhibitions represent a significant push by the MFA St. Petersburg to engage with complex contemporary themes such as the transformative power of the creative process and the sociopolitical implications of information control. By pairing Banisadr’s intuitive, "alchemical" approach to painting with Shelley and Paulson’s critique of "alternative facts," the museum creates a dialogue about how viewers perceive truth and narrative in a visually and informationally overloaded world.