I once titled a painting Is Time an Arrow or a Wheel? (2023). The question has stayed with me because I have never really experienced history as a straight line. We are taught to understand it that way: one period replaces another, one ideology defeats another, one style is exhausted and gives way to the next. But in life, and especially in painting, time seems to behave differently. Things return. Images return. Violence returns. Myths return. A gesture can disappear for centuries and suddenly become alive again in another image, another culture, another moment.
Image: Ali Banisadr, Is time an arrow or a wheel?, 2023
Oil on linen
167.6 x 223.5 cm
66 x 88 in
© Ali Banisadr
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
September 30 2026
