a boundary meant to separate gcac

Aryana Polat: A Boundary Meant to Separate

Grand Central Art Center
August 1 - November, 2026

A Boundary Meant to Separate transforms the gallery into a contemporary ruin, inspired by Aryana Polat’s research on Cold War infrastructure. She focuses on how their meanings continue to shift long after their military function has ended. Cast concrete walls, lightened and deliberately weakened through customized material processes, become fragments suspended between preservation and collapse. The exhibition asks how political structures persist not only as architecture, but through the symbolic systems that continue to organize collective memory.

Los Angeles’s Nike Missile Program is a ring of now-defunct nuclear missile sites scattered around the county during the Cold War. Their highly visible placements created a material threat to the USSR, as well as a psychic reminder of nuclear threat to American citizens. Many of the sites have since been demolished and paved over with concrete. They remain scars of a once-mythic infrastructure – containers of Cold War politics and a precedent for current geopolitical entanglements.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Aryana Polat (b. 1995) was raised in the San Fernando Valley and lives in Los Angeles, CA. She works in sculpture, drawing, and performance inspired by myth-history, a Persian poetic tradition that weaves history, fantasy, and mysticism. Polat places mythic narratives alongside extractive resources, considering how each participates in constructing cultural identity and political boundaries.

Her material research treats failure as a mode of insight, using transformation to move through and reshape the structures she inhabits. Motivated by the ways physical and political systems tangibly shape everyday life, Polat navigates cultural gaps carved by loss and translation, exploring how migration, trade, and interdependence complicate the fidelity of nationhood.

Polat holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2021), and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California Los Angeles (2026). Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout Los Angeles, New England, and online publications. Polat has a public work “And where would I go from your presence?”, installed at Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota, and has staged performances at Coaxial Arts Foundation and APT 310 in Los Angeles.