The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will open the first mid-career survey of Abbas Akhavan on November 12, 2026, marking the Iranian-born artist's first major exhibition in the United States. Titled Abbas Akhavan: Variations on a Garden, the show runs through April 18, 2027, and draws together work from twenty years of practice, much of it never before shown in the country.

Akhavan, who was born in Tehran in 1977 and now lives between Montreal and Berlin, is currently representing Canada at the 2026 Venice Biennale. His practice turns to gardens as places where beauty and violence meet: soil, water and living plants become materials for works that trace the effects of war, displacement and the destruction of cultural heritage across the Middle East.

Among the works on view is curtain call, variations on a folly from 2021, which rebuilds the colonnade that once led to the ancient Arch of Palmyra in Syria. Study for a Monument, begun in 2013 and still ongoing, sets bronze casts of plants native to the Tigris and Euphrates region onto cotton sheets. Another centrepiece, cast for a folly, recreates the ransacked lobby of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion; the Walker acquired the work in 2025. The exhibition also includes spring from 2021 and A Study for a Garden from 2014.

The show is curated by Pavel Pys, the Walker's curator of visual arts and collections strategy, with Brandon Eng. It is accompanied by the artist's first monograph, a 280-page volume with essays by Pys, David Joselit and Oxana Timofeeva. An opening-day talk with the artist takes place on November 12 from 6 to 8 pm.