The acceleration of contemporary life finds in Cellula, the first solo exhibition by Iranian artist Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi at ME Vannucci in Pistoia, a significant countertrend, rooted in an artistic research that chooses to reclaim natural rhythms as a form of cultural resistance. Born in Tehran in 1988 and trained at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, the city where he currently lives and works, Moghanjooghi arrived in Italy in 2011 bringing with him a wealth of experience gained over five years as an assistant in an architecture studio in his native city. This technical training, combined with his subsequent work as a building restorer, naturally brought him closer to the use of materials such as cement mortars, bricks and stone, igniting his interest in their use in past civilizations, for example in ancient lime-based mortars. It is precisely on this material expertise that his artistic practice is based today, where knowledge of construction processes is transformed into expressive language.
Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi, “Cellula”, 2025, site specific installation, nylon, steel cables, expanded clay, nebulized water, concrete sculptures, copper sulphate and steel, room size. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Erika Pellicci
The decisive turning point comes in 2025, when the artist transforms the D’io Bio project – born during the Una Boccata d’Arte residency in Calabria and composed of three works in which the written word becomes matter – into a real agricultural company dedicated to mushroom research and cultivation. This choice represents much more than a professional change: it configures a different conception of time, body and artistic production, in which the work becomes a living ecosystem and the exhibition space is transformed into a controlled growth laboratory. The transition from city to countryside is not only geographical, but epistemological and marks the passage from an industrial productive logic to a biological temporality elevated to artistic medium. The installation of Cellula presents itself as a total environment that recreates the conditions of a hybrid greenhouse between natural and artificial, where a constant misting system generates a microclimate that activates material transformation processes. This large installation, protected by a transparent plastic membrane, is comparable to an incubator within which organism-sculptures take shape that challenge the boundaries between the plant and mineral kingdoms. The materials used – cement mixed with copper sulfate, humidity-reactive pigments, earth – draw directly from the artist’s experience in architectural restoration, but are here recontextualized in a processual dimension that transforms them into agents of continuous chromatic mutation.
Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi, “membrane”, 2025, hand-painted waterproof polyester fabric, 150×140 cm; “Cellula”, 2025, site-specific installation, nylon, steel cables, expanded clay, nebulized water, concrete sculptures, copper sulphate and steel, room size. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Erika Pellicci
When humidity alters their chemical composition, the works undergo surface metamorphoses ranging from the intense blue of oxidized copper to brilliant green, an oxymoronic demonstration of how technical knowledge of construction materials can generate an unsuspected aesthetics of impermanence. The work, although made with components that are chemically inert, does not present itself as a concluded entity, but as a vital system in continuous evolution, where time becomes a sculptural agent and the artist (like the collector to whom the work is entrusted) a curator of biological processes. The mushroom-shaped and hybrid vegetation sculptures, created through mixtures of different types of cement (black, gray and white), articulate a post-organic landscape where the mimesis of natural growth occurs through industrial matter, in a suggestive integrated poetic reworking of past experience in the construction field and current mycological research. The choice to use reactive pigments configures a work that requires constant care, transforming the relationship between user and artistic object into an affective and responsible relationship. The installation requires daily attention: regular watering, humidity control, protection from external contamination become ritual gestures endowed with real transformative potential, both physical and conceptual. The work, moreover, configuring itself as a living being that demands dedication, introduces an ethics of care rebellious to the superficial logic of cultural consumption. The performative aspect emerges through protective clothing inspired by the jackets used by workers during the Great War: white mantles crossed by synthetic pictorial plant motifs allow the visitor to physically enter the cell-installation without compromising its environmental balance. These garments, which recall both laboratory and liturgical attire, transform access to the work into a sort of initiation in which the user is induced to experience a temporary mineral identity, porous and transpiring. The immersive dimension of the installation involves all the senses: the constant sound of the nebulizer, the humidity that permeates the air and the intense smell of wet earth create a synesthetic sensory experience that reconnects the body to the elementary dimension of the living.
Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi, “Cellula”, 2025, site specific installation, nylon, steel cables, expanded clay, nebulized water, concrete sculptures, copper sulphate and steel, room size. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Erika Pellicci
The research on engraving, documented by the marble works, translates the discourse on temporality from the cyclical plane of nature to the relationship with tradition and cultural memory. The engraved texts, which include references to Persian poetry and existential reflections by the artist, introduce the narrative and biographical dimension within a broader discourse on cultural transmission and diasporic identity, revealing how the artist’s migratory experience from Tehran to Turin continues to deeply inform his aesthetic reflection. The use of a rare marble, from now-exhausted quarries, gives the works a dimension of precariousness and unrepeatable uniqueness that dialogues with ecological reflection on extinction and conservation. The photographic compositions instead use microscopic enlargements of mushrooms, mosses and blood to detect the formal continuity between different levels of the living, suggesting an ecosystemic vision where the boundaries between organic and inorganic, human and non-human dissolve.
Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi, “They say it will rain”, 2025, laser cut on green felt, 500 x 270 cm. Courtesy the artist and ME Vannucci, Pistoia. Photo credit Erika Pellicci
The exhibition project of Cellula thus configures a reflection on art’s responsibility in the face of ecological issues and the global productive crisis. The choice to experiment with an identification between art and agriculture does not represent a gesture of nostalgic escape, but a research that uses daily life as an experimental laboratory. In this sense, art becomes a political practice of resistance and care, proposing alternative models of production and consumption that challenge the dominant extractive logic. Moghanjooghi’s work interrogates the rhythms of contemporaneity by reproposing in crystallized form the direct experience of biological time and configuring a space of reflection where art, science and ecology converge in imagining new ways to inhabit the world. The exhibition cell suggests the delicate sensation of isolation necessary for survival, but also of the profound interconnection that binds all levels of the living in a single system of reciprocal relationships, always subtly reflecting the biographical journey of an artist who has been able to transform his own migratory and professional experience into the emotional microclimate of an innovative aesthetic practice.
Info:
Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi. Cellula
18/05 – 31/07/2025
ME Vannucci
Via Gorizia, 122 – Pistoia
www.mevannucci.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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