Christian Alborz Oldham: Having no talent is not enough
(Portland, OR) – SOCIETY is honored to present a solo exhibition by Berlin-
based artist Christian Alborz Oldham entitled Having no talent is not enough.
The exhibition opens August 23, 2025 and continues through November 15,
- Oldham will join us November 15 for a closing reception.
Having no talent is not enough is a concise edit of works in print, sculpture,
painting, and publication, including Moon High School, a new 200,000-word
florilegium published by SOCIETY on the occasion of the exhibition.
Each of these works is a double: bootleg, replication, edition, pair. Some are
artifacts of research of a connoisseurial nature that additionally attends to the
historical. One is reminded of another thread of Oldham’s work that traced the
trans-Pacific reciprocal flow of historical cultural influence through the works
of an avant-garde fashion designer. But there are also here images of that cate-
gory of casual observational or representational catch-and-release that one
once found on tumblr and are now a social media commonplace.
It’s not the questions of authorship, appropriation, fabrication, replication
raised by these works that preoccupy us. These questions have been well and
properly wrung out after a century of their exercise in modern and contempo-
rary art practices and discourses although taken together they do say some-
thing about the practice of contemporary art in 2025. Rather, SOCIETY is
interested in the social dimensions of Oldham’s works to include reception
and its delays, assertions of a genealogy, the auto-production of discourse,
modes and means of circulation of image and text through which social forms
may be constructed.
SOCIETY posits additionally that attention to these vertical and horizon-
tal temporal axes is the underpainting, as it were, of art history, taking up
the question Seth Siegelaub posed in 2011 through a poster edition recently
made again by Oldham in their exhibition at Kunstverein München: “How is
Art History Made?”
Christian Alborz Oldham
Having no talent is not enough
Christian Alborz Oldham
Christian Alborz Oldham’s practice presents a ludic approach to the politics
surrounding production, re-production, and reception with a particular interest
in garments and textiles, technology, copy, transaction, and economics. These
concepts are explored in a dedicated practice of ikebana, an art form resis-
tant to permanent exhibition, sale, and preservation. Oldham holds an MFA
from University of Washington, a BA in Art History and MBA from Willamette
University, and has certification as a freestyle sense from the Ryusei school
of ikebana.
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