CARBON 12 offers everyone to view The Task of the Mythologist, a solo exhibition by artist Anahita Razmi, open until 20 March 2026. The show takes its title and conceptual impetus from Mythologies (1957), the seminal text by cultural theorist Roland Barthes that investigates how “myths” are constructed through everyday signs, symbols, and cultural objects. The exhibition presents an array of all-new works alongside extensions of existing series, such as WORLD MUSIC and Talismanic Polarities, and features an intervention by artist Peyman Shafieezadeh.
The exhibition examines the processes by which contemporary myths are formed, disseminated, and invested with meaning within global visual culture. Razmi positions myth as a living mechanism that operates within both material and virtual worlds. Digital icons like the fingers-crossed emoji, talismanic garments, pop-culture emblems, and other familiar signs are stripped of fixed meaning and observed in their fluid and contextually shifting states. Through displacement, juxtaposition, transformation, and play, the works disrupt conventional systems of value and invite viewers to reconsider how meaning is produced and stabilised through cultural circulation.
Across diverse mediums, including video, installation, photography, text-based interventions, sculptural elements, and found objects, Razmi suspends familiar references in a dynamic field where multiple interpretations can coexist without a predefined hierarchy. Myth, in her hands, is not simply debunked but re-examined as an active force shaping perception, belief systems, and the socio-political frameworks through which we engage with the world.
About the artist
Anahita Razmi (b. 1981, Hamburg, Germany) is a multidisciplinary artist of German and Iranian heritage who divides her time between London (UK) and Berlin (Germany). She studied fine arts and media arts at Bauhaus-University Weimar (Germany), Pratt Institute in New York (USA), and State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart (Germany).
In her practice, Razmi explores the fractures between cultures, languages, and systems of representation. Through strategies of appropriation and displacement, she investigates how images and symbols circulate, shift in meaning, and acquire new ideological weight across contexts. Her artworks reveal the power structures embedded in acts of interpretation and meaning-making, often employing subtle irony and formal precision to unsettle familiar cultural codes. By reconfiguring widely recognised signs and narratives, she challenges assumptions surrounding identity, stereotype, and authorship and transforms everyday visual language into a critical tool.
Razmi has displayed her works in multiple exhibits across the globe, which include At The Edge, Art Week Riyadh (Riyadh, KSA, 2025); the 7th Çanakkale Biennale (Turkey, 2020); Spoilers (solo) (Kunsthaus Innsbruck, Austria, 2018); the 55th Venice Biennial – Padiglione Venezia (Italy, 2013); and Signal & Noise, Media Arts Festival (Vancouver, Canada, 2010), to name a few.
Razmi has received numerous awards and grants, such as the Journey Across Asia Award (2019); Tutti, Winner of the Walter Tiemann Prize (2016); the Emdash Award from the Frieze Foundation (2011), among others. Her works are held in several esteemed collections, for example, the Farjam Collection (Dubai), Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Germany), and Davis Museum at Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA, USA).
To learn more about The Task of the Mythologist, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in attending Hard Like Tears, Soft Like Glass by Shamsa Al Omaira and When the Window Refused to Fly, and the Arch Decided to Hold the Sky by Asma Belhamar.
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