
Hard Up for Support
2016
Hard Up for Support brings together two materially opposed presences: the cool luminosity of an HD video loop playing across a digital LED monitor and the dense, geological weight of marble serving as its physical support. Nashat stages this collision with characteristic precision, inviting viewers to consider how bodily vulnerability and institutional display systems speak to one another. The footage itself engages the artist's sustained preoccupation with flesh, surface, and the aestheticization of pain or longing, rendered here through imagery that oscillates between clinical detachment and sensory immediacy. The marble base does not merely hold the screen but actively participates as a sculptural argument, its geological permanence thrown into relief against the flickering temporality of the video above. Nashat, who works at the intersection of performance, sculpture, and moving image, has built a practice concerned with how desire and bodily experience are mediated by contemporary systems of value, from medicine and athletics to the art market itself. Hard Up for Support exemplifies the formal economy that defines his mature work, where each material choice carries conceptual consequence and nothing operates as mere decoration. The title, with its deliberately ambiguous syntax, functions as a provocation, hovering between financial precarity, physical dependency, and emotional need without resolving neatly into any single reading. This productive indeterminacy is central to Nashat's method. Currently on offer through ICA Philadelphia, this 2016 work represents a significant moment in the artist's ongoing investigation into the body as a site of aesthetic and political contestation. Signed by the artist, the piece arrives with the authority of direct authorship in a practice increasingly recognized across major institutional and private collections internationally. For collectors attuned to the evolving conversation around post-internet sculpture and video-based installation, Hard Up for Support offers an intellectually rigorous and visually compelling entry point into one of the more distinctive voices working today.
- Medium
- HD video loop on digital LED monitor, marble
- Signed
- Yes
- Spotted At
- Gallery · ICA Philadelphia
More by Shahryar Nashat



Start the Discussion
Request access to join the discussion