With Buoyant Dribble Künstler:innenhaus Bremen presents Anita Esfandiari’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. For her exhibition in Bremen, Esfandiari primarily works with sculptural painting: painted surfaces extend into the space, creating an installation that dissolves the boundaries between painting and sculpture. The paintings are not static objects but spatial interventions. They invite viewers to experience them from different perspectives.
In her painterly practice, Anita Esfandiari focuses on figures and bodies captured in moments of movement and transition. The artist is particularly interested in moments immediately before or after an event that itself remains outside the visible frame. Her practice aims to store temporality across multiple canvases. She combines the conceptual dimension of the images with the spatial dimension of the exhibition space to create an experience composed together with the visitors. Movement manifests itself in multiple ways in the exhibition: in the exhibition title, in the bodies of the figures, in the ever-changing state of water as one of the central motifs in the artist’s paintings, in the shifting of figures from one canvas to the next, or in the movement of visitors through the installation. The various forms of movement in this exhibition condense what preoccupied Esfandiari during the conception of her solo show: how to translate this element onto a two-dimensional surface. For the artist, however, movement also plays a role on a formal level. Esfandiari inscribes it into her works by layering different pictorial worlds.
The exhibition Buoyant Dribble takes as its starting point a photographic image showing teenagers playing basketball. Yet behind this seemingly simple game lies an entirely different meaning. Through the sharp contrast between the rapid movement of the ball game – captured in time as a photograph and transformed by Esfandiari into a three-dimensional, walkable, dissectible space – the viewer’s attention is directed toward the hidden, invisible, and structural aspects of the scene: playing ball as passion, basketball as self-assertion. With regard to philosophies of collective action that emphasize the role of informal, non-institutionally organized collectives without fixed ideology or identifiable leadership – yet which nonetheless initiate social change through everyday practices – the artist uses the image of playing basketball as a reflection of a condition in which individuals continuously adjust to shifting terms. As in a game whose rules or ground may change, strategies must be recalibrated. The blue figures, neither naked nor clothed, are symbolic characters or avatars that detach themselves from fixed biological and social categories and allow for alternative self-conceptions. Esfandiari realizes this moment of shifting conditions in the works “Not here, not now – The air remembered”, “Not here, not now – Glimmers of the then, leaking of the now”, and “Not here, not now – Fractures, jersey blocks” (2025), showing the scene of the playing figures within ever newly imagined landscapes that open up new possibilities for action.
These quiet reorganizations often take place in seemingly banal, non-political spheres of leisure and everyday life. The depicted figures appear to float, and their bodies shift – as if in the individual frames of a flipbook – through altered phases of movement as in “Not here, not now – Glimmers of the then, leaking of the now”; gravity is suspended or restored, as in “Not here, not now – Fractures, jersey blocks”. The five large-format paintings are connected by a construction of vertical and diagonal wooden beams reminiscent of a basketball hoop. For Esfandiari, each frame functions as a protocol of a moment. Each passage through the exhibition generates its own narrative.
The works in the exhibition describe a state in which familiar orders – social as well as digital – lose their clarity. In this in-between, new spaces of possibility emerge, which the works deliberately keep open. Rather than offering clear identifications or answers, they create space and call for self-reflection. The resulting ambivalence is not a deficiency but a central design principle that recurs throughout the exhibition. In her book “The Love of Painting” (2017), art historian and editor of Texte zur Kunst Isabelle Graw writes of the painted image that above all the “limitation of its surface requires intellectual abstraction” and is therefore a particularly suitable medium for openly “speculating about its contents.” In this sense, painting’s confined surface becomes a generative space that invites viewers to move beyond what is given and to imagine meanings that exceed the visible.
With Buoyant Dribble, Esfandiari addresses a structure of inevitability. The fantastical paintings place the figures into spaces imagined for them by the artist. The exhibition stages environments in which stability is provisional and conditions appear to shift without warning. Rather than invoking escape, the works attend to persistence within such instability. Bodies remain in motion, even when the structures surrounding them seem uncertain or constraining. In this suspended state, movement becomes less a dramatic gesture than a continuous act of orientation, a way of enduring, adjusting, and remaining present within conditions that are not of one’s own making. In the installation, Esfandiari draws the audience even deeper into this imagination and opens up further layers of the same structure. The visual language in “Not here, not now – Witnessed” and “Not here, not now – Rehearsal” (2026) changes and increasingly detaches itself from references to an experienced reality: the basketball hoop disappears, and the avatars remain suspended in their movement without this original framing condition. Esfandiari shifts the background into speculative spaces in which physical, narrative, and temporal orders are suspended or reconfigured. Reality no longer appears as a verifiable frame of reference, but as material that is deformed, expanded, and overwritten. The scenes operate beyond plausible patterns of action and open up spaces of possibility that are less representation than proposition. They are projections of a mode of thinking that does not affirm the functioning and order of the world but reimagines it.
The exhibition can thus be read as an image of a present in which every supposed situation merely marks the transition into a new uncertainty and articulates the capacity that, when history changes, the individual is prepared to find new solutions and respond. Esfandiari’s works suggest that this does not only generate difficulties, but also holds transformative potential.
The works in Buoyant Dribble demonstrate how imagination, visibility, and small transgressive acts of creation can produce counter-narratives. These forms of resistance are not always immediately visible, yet they remain lasting and effective: self-confident and vulnerable at once, sustained through connection with others. Such embodied relations of everyday presence function both as motifs and as the conceptual foundation of Esfandiari’s practice, acting as autonomous and powerful forms of expression. The depiction of bodies in motion and their sequential interaction thus refers not only to leisure or play, but also to an appropriation of space, a questioning of normative structures, and a plea for shared presence.
Anita Esfandiari was born in Tehran, Iran, and graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2022, where she studied under Prof. Judith Hopf. Prior to that, she studied painting, at Art and Architecture – Islamic Azad University in Tehran. Working across sculpture, painting, and video, Esfandiari has exhibited at SculptureCenter New York (2025), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2023), Opelvillen Rüsselsheim (2020), Abi Gallery and Delgosha Art Gallery, Tehran (2020), and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Anita Esfandiari currently lives and works in Berlin.
The exhibition is generously supported by Waldemar Koch Stiftung, Beate + Hartmut Schaefers Stiftung, Rittersport Kunststiftung, Senator für Kultur Bremen and VGH Stiftung.
